Kaspersky has counted more than 232,000 ransomware attacks in the first three months of the year

Ransomware continues to claim victims, much more than in 2018. In addition to the victims, ransomware versions are also increasing: Kaspersky has discovered more than 16,000, belonging to 8 different families, in the first quarter of 2019.

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Last updated Sep 3, 2019 78

We thought that by now the ransomware phenomenon was in decline but in this second quarter of the year there was a real peak of attacks. In the Kaspersky IT Threat Evolution Q2 2019 report, the Russian security company counted 232,292 attack attempts, 46% more than measured in the same period of 2019, and as many as 16,017 new versions of ransomware, many of which were probably created with one of the many ransomware kits available online.

Wannacy continues to do damage

Despite the increasing number of variants of ransomware, the most widespread is always Wannacry, which counts 23.4% of the attempts of infection detected by Kaspersky, demonstrating once again that the culture of computer security is not widespread in the world. The patch has been available for some time, even for older versions of Windows, yet many still have not taken the basic precautions to avoid infection.

The second most-used ransomware was instead of GandCrab, despite the authors of this dangerous malware announced months ago that they would have suspended their activities.

” At this time of the year, we have seen growth in the number of new versions of ransomware, even though the developers of a cyber-threat like GandCrab have suspended their business in early June ” – explained Fedor Sinitsyn, Kaspersky Security Researcher – ” This family of ransomware has been one of the most popular among cyber criminals for the cryptor, and for more than 18 months it has been on the list of the most relevant ransomware families we have observed, despite its ” decline “, we have not detected a downsizing of statistics, indeed there are still numerous active Trojans. The GandCrab case is certainly an excellent example of how economically effective a ransomware can be: its developers have chosen to terminate their malicious activity after claiming to have collected a huge amount of money thanks to the extortions carry on with the victims threat users replace GandCrab “.

Some interesting data from Kaspersky’s report

The report did not only focus on ransomware but on all types of cyber threats detected by Kaspersky security solutions which, in the last quarter alone, amounted to more than 700 million (717,057,912). Of these, 228,206 are malware that try to steal money by stealing credentials to access banking systems.

Even mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets are always targeted: Kaspersky has counted 753,550 attempts to install potentially dangerous packages, 13,899 banking trojans and 23,294 ransomware. In any case, numbers are lower than those of last year, a sign that the trend is decreasing.