Ransomware

Industrial ransomware attacks spike, manufacturing most hit

CyberScoop reports that ransomware attacks against the industrial sector have reached 905 in 2023, representing a 50% increase over the previous year.

Seventy percent of such attacks were targeted at organizations in the manufacturing industry, mostly due to its significantly accelerated pace of digitization compared with other sectors, according to a report from Dragos. "As a result of not investing in IoT security when they did that, we're seeing a lot of ransomware cases, a lot of activists, criminals, etc., disrupting manufacturing far more than gets reported publicly," said Dragos CEO and founder Robert Lee, who noted that increasingly prevalent digitization is poised to raise ransomware incidents in other industries. The findings also showed that most ransomware attacks against industrial organizations last year were conducted by the LockBit ransomware operation. Meanwhile, the ALPHV/BlackCat ransomware gang, which was behind nearly 9% of attacks last year, admitted compromising Lower Valley Energy in Wyoming, Trans-Northern Pipelines in Canada, and Sercide in Spain last week.

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