Extortion payments hit new records as ransomware crisis intensifies

extortion ransomware — Image by tanpanamanoob | Bigstockphoto

The average ransomware payment climbed 82% to a record US$570,000 (HKD4,446,000) in the first half of 2021, as cybercriminals employed increasingly aggressive tactics to coerce organizations into paying larger ransoms. The increase comes after the average payment last year surged 171% to more than US$312,000. These figures, compiled by the Unit 42 security consulting group, quantify what many of us already know — the ransomware crisis continues to intensify as criminal enterprises boost investment in highly profitable ransomware operations.

We already knew it was getting worse from following the news, and many of us also knew from personal experience. Ransomware attacks have prevented us from accessing work computers, pushed up meat prices, led to gasoline shortages, shut down schools, delayed legal cases, prevented some of us from getting our cars inspected and caused some hospitals to turn away patients.

The Rise of Quadruple Extortion

The rise of “quadruple extortion” is one disturbing trend identified by Unit 42 consultants as they handled dozens of ransomware cases in the first half of 2021. Ransomware operators now commonly use as many as four techniques for pressuring victims into paying:

Encryption: Victims pay to regain access to scrambled data and compromised computer systems that stop working because key files are encrypted.
Data Theft: Hackers release sensitive information if a ransom is not paid. (This trend really took off in 2020.)
Denial of Service (DoS): Ransomware gangs launch denial of service attacks that shut down a victim’s public websites.
Harassment: Cybercriminals contact customers, business partners, employees and media to tell them the organization was hacked.

While it’s rare for one organization to be the victim of all four techniques, this year we have increasingly seen ransomware gangs engage in additional approaches when victims don’t pay up after encryption and data theft. That is twice the number described in the 2021 Unit 42 Ransomware Threat Report that covered 2020 trends, which flagged double encryption as an emerging trend. As they’ve adopted these new extortion approaches, ransomware gangs have gotten greedier. Among the dozen of cases that Unit 42 consultants reviewed in the first half of 2021, the average ransom demand was US$5.3 million (HKD41.34 million). That’s up by 500%+ from a 2020 average of US$847,000 (HKD6.6million).

The highest ransom demand of a single victim seen by our consultants rose to US$50 million (HKD390 million) in the first half of 2021 from US$30 million (HKD234 million) last year. Additionally, REvil recently tested out a new approach by offering to provide a universal decryption key to all organizations impacted by the Kaseya attack for US$70 million (HKD546 million), though it quickly dropped the asking price to $50 million (HKD390 million). Kaseya eventually obtained a universal decryption key, but it’s unclear what payment was made, if any.

The largest confirmed payment, so far this year, was the US$11 million (HKD85.9 million) that JBS SA disclosed after a massive attack in June. Last year, the largest payment we observed was $10 million (HKD78 million).

The Ransomware Trajectory

We expect the ransomware crisis will continue to gain momentum over the coming months, as ransomware groups further hone tactics for coercing victims into paying and also develop new approaches for making attacks more disruptive. For example, we’ve started to see ransomware gangs encrypt a critical type of infrastructure software known as a hypervisor, which can corrupt multiple virtual instances running on a single server. We expect to see increased targeting of hypervisors and other managed infrastructure software in the coming months. We also expect to see more targeting of managed service providers and their customers in the wake of the attack that leveraged Kaseya remote management software, which was used to distribute ransomware to clients of managed service providers (MSPs).

While we predict that ransoms will continue their upward trajectory, we do expect to see some gangs continue to focus on the low end of the market, regularly targeting small businesses that lack resources to invest heavily in cybersecurity. So far this year, we have observed groups, including NetWalker, SunCrypt and Lockbit, demanding and taking in payments ranging from US$10,000 (HKD78,000) to US$50,000 (HKD390,000). While they represent a small percentage of the largest ransoms we observed, payments that size can have a debilitating impact on a small organization.

To learn more about ransomware, check out our extensive ransomware coverage on the Unit 42 blog. Highlights include the 2021 Unit 42 Ransomware Threat Report along with profiles of some of the world’s most prolific ransomware gangs:

Defending against ransomware attacks starts with having a plan. You can jump-start that process with a Ransomware Readiness Assessment.