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A police department in Cockrell Hill, Texas abandoned years of video evidence and digital documentation after being struck by a ransomware encrypting all the data. In Washington, DC, the police couldn’t access its CCTV footage storage system days before Donald Trump’s inauguration. All of this news came out in the last week, stemming from a rapid escalation of how ransomware is deployed. And it’s only going to get worse.
Ransomware has existed in various forms for over a decade. In a classic ransomware scenario, malware storms your computer, encrypts your data, and won’t give you the decryption key unless you pay a fee, usually in Bitcoin.
At this point, ransomware attacks cash in a swooping $1 billion-per-year business. And, more importantly, the trend is creating collateral damage like never before.
In its own way, ransomware is not dissimilar from other types of cyberattacks, which have increasingly targeted corporations with large databases of consumer info—think of how many times you’ve been forced to change your passwords and credit card credentials lately—over one-off consumer grabs.
“That’s really a huge change, that ransomware is actually ransoming back the ability to do business,” says Jack Danahy, CTO of cybersecurity firm Barkly.
Cybersecurity firm Carbonite and The Ponemon Institute, an independent research group conducted a joint survey where it was found out that more than half of the ransomware attacks taking place in the corporate world start with an employee using an enterprise device for personal tasks. Forty percent of corporate victims in the same survey said that ransomware spread across devices in their networks. Sometimes, all it takes is one person’s errant click to take down an entire system, especially if ransomware has circulated and can activate on many devices at once.
