Ransomware went through the roof in August 2016

Number of money-grabbing attacks increased 30 per cent last month

RAMSOMWARE ATTACKS are showing no signs of slowing down and were notably abundant in August of this year, this is according to Check Point.

Check Point does keep a watchful eye on these sorts of things, it did warn that ransom-based malware now domineers when attacks happen on enterprise networks.

Check Point announced that the number of active ransomware families have increased by 12% in August of this year, this meant the number of attacks expanded by 30%, this increase is down to the ease of use and easy access to the malware.

“Check Point believes that the growth in ransomware is a symptom of the relative ease of broadly deploying ransomware once a variant is created, and of the number of businesses paying ransoms to release critical data. This makes it a lucrative and attractive attack vector for cyber criminals,” the firm said in a blog post entitled August’s Top 10 Most Wanted Malware.

“For the fifth consecutive month HummingBad remained the most common malware used to attack mobile devices, but the number of detected incidents fell by more than 50 per cent.”

HummingBad isn’t the only issue. Conficker suffered the hugest impact in August, this made up 14% of all attacks, after this was viruses Jbossjmx and Sality, both of them with 9% each.

Check Point have explained that companies are being put in a bad situation because no wants to pay up and no one really wants to get hacked in the first place.

“Businesses face a Catch 22 when it comes to dealing with ransomware. If they don’t pay the ransom they face losing critical data and valuable assets for good. If they do pay, they only encourage cyber criminals to use ransomware as it becomes a lucrative attack vector,” said Nathan Shuchami, head of threat prevention at Check Point.

“To nullify this, organisations need advanced threat prevention measures on networks, endpoints and mobile devices to stop malware at the pre-infection stage to ensure that they are adequately secured against the latest threats.”