Many of the high-profile malware attacks that emerged in 2020 were of the “Double Extortion” type. This is what emerges from the annual report by Yoroi, an Italian company that deals with IT security and which daily monitors everything that happens on the Net from the point of view of cyber attacks.
And this detail on the “Double Extortion” is by no means trivial. Because it tells of how cybercriminals are refining their techniques, putting companies in more and more difficulties. They are attacks based on advanced malware that, as Yoroi has verified, have found a great push in the current condition (therefore in the pandemic world, which has significantly accelerated towards digital).
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In fact, due to the weakening of the network perimeter and the massive and sudden number of changes in the IT infrastructure, IT departments have struggled to keep up with security controls.
But what are “Double Extortion” attacks? They are often associated with ransomware attacks. However, talking about ransomware is an understatement. The modus operandi of these attacks is different. The term ransomware, in fact, circulated even before the birth of the Double Extortion phenomenon: originally ransomware attacks mostly hit private individuals, encrypting the data inside their PC. Instead, the dynamics of Double Extortion attacks involve entire companies and even the national productive fabric.
“Attacks of this type represent a major paradigm shift in the digital extortion arena. – explains to Sole 24 Ore Marco Ramilli, CEO and Founder of Yoroi – Born to respond to the reassuring certainty of the victim offered by modern backup or disaster recovery systems, they introduce in the blackmail phase, the publication of intimate documents for the victim himself. In this way the victim not only sees their information systems blocked but also their documents shared on the network. A second psychological lever that is extremely significant for every victim. But we must not give in to blackmail, we must not feed that market that deviates digital justice and for this reason we have decided to collaborate with Il Sole 24 Ore by offering a set of free information to raise awareness of the enormous frequency of digital threats and their historical trend in order to intrigue and alert his attention to what is most relevant at a precise moment “.