As of the end of March, 93 percent of all phishing emails contained encryption ransomware, according to a report released today by PhishMe.
That was up from 56 percent in December, and less than 10 percent every other month of last year. [ Deep Dive: How to rethink security for the new world of IT . | Discover how to secure your systems with InfoWorld’s Security newsletter . ] And the number of phishing emails hit 6.3 million in the first quarter of this year, a 789 percent increase over the last quarter of 2015. The anti-phishing vendor also counted the number of different variants of phishing emails that it saw. Ransomware accounted for 51 percent of all variants in March, up from just 29 percent in February and 15 percent in January. The skyrocketing growth is due to that fact that ransomware is getting easier and easier to send and that it offers a quick and easy return on investment.
Other types of cyberattacks typically take more work to monetize. Stolen credit card numbers have to be sold and used before the cards are canceled, for example. Identity theft takes even more of a time commitment.
With ransomware, however, victims tend to pay quickly. Instead of hunting through company networks for valuable data, exfiltrating it, processing it, and monetizing it, ransomware criminals can just sit back and watch the money flow in.
"If you look at the price point of paying the ransom, it is rarely more than 1 or 2 Bitcoin, that’s $400 to $800, maybe $1,000 depending on the exchange rate," said Brendan Griffin, Threat Intelligence Manager at PhishMe. "That’s a relatively low price point for a small to medium business."
The amount is low enough that it’s often easier to victims to pay up rather than struggle to recover the […]
