Security News > 2020 > January > ThreatList: Ransomware Costs Double in Q4, Sodinokibi Dominates

Ransomware costs more than doubled in the fourth quarter of 2019, with the average ransom payment skyrocketing to $84,116, a 104 percent surge up from $41,198 in the third quarter.

"In Q4, ransomware actors also began exfiltrating data from victims and threatening its release if the ransom was not paid. In addition to remediation and containment costs, this new complication brings forth the potential costs of 3rd party claims as a result of the data breach," said researchers with Coveware in an analysis published this week, which aggregated anonymized ransomware cases handled by Coveware's incident response team.

Costs from ransomware attacks can vary, including the cost of a ransom payment if one is made, the cost of remediation efforts to a network and its associated hardware devices.

Once compromised, these tools can be used to push the ransomware to every endpoint managed by the MSP. "It is not uncommon for an MSP to have hundreds of individually impacted end clients if Sodinokibi is successful in gaining persistence within the MSPs network," said researchers.

In terms of victims, professional services, healthcare, and software services were the most common industries to be targeted by ransomware in the fourth quarter, while the average size of companies targeted by ransomware were 610 employees.

News URL

https://threatpost.com/threatlist-ransomware-costs-double-in-q4-sodinokibi-dominates/152200/