"Top 10 Ways Attackers Are Increasing Pressure on Their Ransomware Victims to Pay"

Researchers at Sophos conducted a new study on ransomware and based their findings on evidence and insight from a team of 24/7 incident responders who help organizations under active cyberattacks. The researchers found a shift in ransomware pressure techniques from solely encrypting data to including other pain points, such as harassing employees. The researchers found that the top 10 ways attackers are increasing pressure on their ransomware victims to get them to pay the ransom include:

• Stealing data and threatening to publish or auction it online
• Emailing and calling employees, including senior executives, threatening to reveal their personal information
• Notifying or threatening to notify business partners, customers, the media, and more of the data breach and exfiltration
• Silencing victims by warning them not to contact the authorities
• Recruiting insiders to help them breach networks
• Resetting passwords
• Phishing attacks targeting victim email accounts
• Deleting online backups and shadow volume copies
• Printing physical copies of the ransom note on all connected devices, including point of sale terminals
• Launching distributed denial-of-service attacks against the target’s websit

Help Net Security reports: "Top 10 Ways Attackers Are Increasing Pressure on Their Ransomware Victims to Pay"