Security News > 2023 > June > Interested in $10,000,000? Ready to turn in the Clop ransomware crew?
The latest high-profile cybercrime exploits attributed to the Clop ransomware crew aren't your traditional sort of ransomware attacks.
Conventional ransomware attacks are where your files get scrambled, your business gets totally derailed, and a message appears telling you that a decryption key for your data is available.
As you can imagine, given that ransomware goes back to the days before everyone had internet access, the idea of scrambling your files where they lay was a dastardly trick to save time.
Victims of file-encrypting ransomware ironically end up acting as unwilling prison wardens of their own data.
In today's cloud computing world, cyberattacks where ransomware crooks actually take copies of all, or at least many, of your vital files are not only technically possible, they're commonplace.
At the same time, even if the crooks only have time to steal some of your most interesting files from your most interesting computers in the most interesting parts of your network, they nevertheless get a second sword of Damocles to hold over your head. That second layer of blackmail goes along the lines of, "Pay up and we promise to delete the stolen data; refuse to pay and we won't merely hold onto it, we'll go wild with it."