Cyber Extortion

Cyber extortion becomes the new norm of cyber attacks, ranging from ransomware, confidential information leaking, DDOS. Cyber extortion is an action which attackers hold hostage of the organizations’ valuable information assets such as confidential data, trade secret, client information, IT systems, in demands for payment. It often takes the form of ransomware, hacking and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, all of which could paralyze the organizations’ business and/or services, or destruct the organization’s reputation and public images, or cause significant financial damage.

Ransomware

Ransomware has many points of entry into the victim’s IT environment, such as phishing emails, website pop-ups and exploiting specific vulnerabilities. The initial ransomware attacks almost always take the form of fileless exploitation to gain a footprint in the victim’s systems. After that, the ransomware will spread itself to more systems by exploiting vulnerabilities. Ransomware encrypts the organization’s critical data. Attackers demands payments to decrypt the organization’s data.

Information Leaking

Attacker could obtain a copy of organization’s sensitive or confidential information, such as customer data, financial information, by phishing attacks or vulnerability exploitation. Attackers demand payments in order not to publish the organization’s sensitive information.

DDOS

Attackers typically engage in small attacks against the organizations, extorts them for money with the threat of conducting larger attacks.

To mitigate cyber extortion risks, organization should consider implementing multi-layer defenses, including but not limited to:

  • Monitor endpoints to detect malware and attacks
  • Develop incident response plan to manage ransomware incident
  • Establish disaster recovery plan to recover from ransomware attacks
  • Provide security awareness training on social engineering and phishing attacks
  • Backup critical business data securely with protection from ransomware

Cyber extortion targets the organizations of all sizes, but small to medium size organizations very often fall victim due to lack of effective security controls and safeguards. With limited resources and expertise, the organizations must smartly invest the resources in the most effective and efficient controls to deal with cyber extortion attacks.