Security News > 2022 > July > Ransom payments fall as fewer victims choose to pay hackers
Ransomware statistics from the second quarter of the year show that the ransoms paid to extortionists have dropped in value, a trend that continues since the last quarter of 2021.
Ransomware remediation firm Coveware has published a report today with ransomware data from the second quarter of 2022 showing that although the average payment increased, the median value recorded a significant drop.
In Q2 2022, the average ransom payment was $228,125.
The median ransom payment was $36,360, a steep fall of 51% compared to the previous quarter.
"We have also seen an encouraging trend among large organizations refusing to consider negotiations when ransomware groups demand impossibly high ransom amounts."
In terms of the most active ransomware groups over the past quarter, statistics that Coveware collected show that BlackCat tops the list with 16.9% of the published attacks, followed by LockBit, which accounted for 13.1%. Another new trend observed by Coveware is the creation of many smaller ransomware-as-a-service operations that draw affiliates from recently defunct syndicates and perform lower-tier, opportunistic attacks.