The United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is at the moment investigating far more than 100 distinct variants of ransomware, numerous of which have been employed in a number of ransomware campaigns.
Info on the Bureau’s initiatives to deal with the malware threat was between the remarks delivered to the United States House Committee on the Judiciary in Washington on Tuesday by Bryan Vorndran, assistant director of the FBI’s Cyber Division.
“There is not a working day that goes by without having several FBI industry workplaces responding to ransomware attacks,” claimed Vorndran, “The ransomware risk is not new, and it has been 1 of the FBI’s top cybercriminal investigative priorities for some time, but we have seen ransomware attack reporting enhance significantly in the previous two yrs, and the impression of these assaults has grown to unsafe proportions, threatening our economic and countrywide security.”
Describing the increase in ransomware use, Vorndran reported that from 2019 to 2021, the variety of ransomware grievances documented to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Middle (IC3) increased by 82%, with a 449% increase in ransom payments over the identical interval.
“‘Ransomware-as-a-service’ (when a developer sells or leases ransomware applications to felony shoppers) has decreased the barrier to entry and technological savviness needed to carry out and gain from these compromises and improved the quantity of criminals conducting ransomware campaigns,” pointed out Vorndran.
He added that when ransomware actors and methods have evolved, the motive guiding the malware’s use was nevertheless maximizing income by paralyzing victims’ operations.
“Cyber-criminals recognize income can be maximized by focusing on organizations the place downtime are not able to be tolerated – especially, infrastructure critical to general public basic safety,” explained Vorndran, “In 2021 alone, the FBI, CISA, and NSA noticed incidents involving ransomware from 14 of the 16 US critical infrastructure sectors.”
The FBI has much more than 800 cyber-skilled agents distribute across 56 subject workplaces and more than 350 sub-workplaces. Vorndran mentioned the Bureau’s attain, one of a kind applications and means ended up unmatched by any other corporation.
He reported: “We can put a cyber-properly trained FBI agent on almost any doorstep in this region within a single hour, and we can execute the same in more than 70 nations in just one day by way of our network of legal attachés and cyber assistant authorized attachés.”
Some parts of this article are sourced from:
www.infosecurity-magazine.com