The above mentioned statistics are for the months of February, March, April and May 2015 and they represent a significant rise in the numbers that were reported for the preceding 6 months. In several industries, a ransomware attack is now considered on par with a significant data breach. Ransomware attacks are capable of causing significant system downtime, loss of critical data, Intellectual Property (IP) theft and more. What was once an attack technique that was aimed solely at susceptible individual users has now developed the ability to afflict advanced enterprise networks as well.
Cybercriminals have effectively cracked this ‘business model’ and are generating a significant amount of money through this attack mechanism. Over the last year or so, there has been tremendous growth in the number of ransomware attacks that have been spotted in the wild.