India facing most ransomware attack with 213 weekly attempts: report

New Delhi: As ransomware attacks are believed to be the next biggest threat in cyberworld, a report on Tuesday revealed that India is the most impacted country with an average of 213 weekly attacks recorded since the beginning of the year, according to an IANS report.

Ransomware attack includes the attacker threatenning to publish or blocks access to your data or computer system, usually by encrypting it, until the victim pays a ransom fee. If the victim doesn't pay in time, the data is gone forever.

As per Check Point Research, India is followed by Argentina, Chile, France and Taiwan with 104, 103, 61 and 50 per organisation, respectively.

Comparing to the beginning of 2020, the report revealed that the global surge in ransomware attacks has hit a 102 percent increase this year and is not showing any sign of slowing down.

While North America's healthcare organisations suffered the most attacks since the beginning of the year, it was the utilities in Europe that absorb the most attacks.

In APAC, insurance/legal are most impacted, while in LATAM, it is the communications industry. In Africa, the financial and banking sector is the most attacked.

According to the report, prominent attacks that have taken place at the end of 2020 and the beginning of 2021 point at a new attack chain -- essentially an expansion to the double extortion ransomware technique, integrating an additional, unique threat to the process -- called as Triple Extortion.

The first notable case is the Vastaamo clinic attack, which happened in October 2020. Innovative at the time, the 40,000-patient Finnish psychotherapy clinic suffered a yearlong breach that culminated in extensive patient data theft and a ransomware attack.

A decent ransom was demanded from the healthcare provider, but surprisingly, smaller sums were also demanded from the patients, who had received the ransom demands individually by email.

In those emails, the attackers threatened to publish their therapist session notes. This was the first attack of its kind within the ransomware attacks landscape, the report said.

The report notes that some ransomware operators use well-researched and highly targeted spear-phishing emails as their attack vector.

Protecting against this ransomware that "slips through the cracks" requires a specialised security solution.

To achieve its objective, ransomware must perform certain anomalous actions, such as opening and encrypting large numbers of files.

Anti-ransomware solutions monitor programmes running on a computer for suspicious behaviours commonly exhibited by ransomware, and if these behaviours are detected, the programme can take action to stop encryption before further damage can be done.

(with minor edits from IANS)