Security News > 2022 > October > When are we gonna stop calling it ransomware? It's just data kidnapping now
It's getting difficult these days to find a ransomware group that doesn't steal data and promise not to sell it if a ransom is paid off.
It's worth making a distinction between classic ransomware infections and data heists by extortionists, Claire Tills, a senior research engineer at Tenable, believes.
Treating ransomware and data theft separately, rather than lumping it all together, will give people a better idea of what types of attack are most prevalent right now, how they happen and how to stop them, what your priorities should be with your IT defenses and data restoration, and so on.
Cybersecurity outfit Digital Shadows already makes this distinction in its quarterly ransomware reports, by excluding the numbers from extortion-only groups, one of its intelligence analysts Ivan Righi told The Register.
While security teams will take steps to protect against ransomware and extortion, remediation is different, Timothy Morris, chief security advisor at Tanium, told The Register.
The double-extortion ransomware trend started in 2020 with the Maze crew, the first to not only encrypt a victim's data but also to steal it and threaten to publicly release it if the ransom wasn't paid.