Nearly 2,700 ransomware attacks were recorded in 2021, which was almost 93% higher than in 2020, while over 65% of all cybersecurity incidents were attributed to ransomware, Channel Futures reports.
North America and Europe were the most targeted regions, while the Conti ransomware gang continued to be the most prolific threat actor, according to the NCC Group's 2021 Annual Threat Monitor.
"We reported on the Conti ransomware group in [the third quarter] of 2021 after getting the opportunity to assess leaked playbooks and training materials associated with this group. What we identified was an operation being run very much like a business enterprise, with thorough recruitment and training processes," said NCC Group Deputy Global Practice Lead of Strategic Threat Intelligence Ian Usher.
Usher notes that while ransomware attacks last month were 36.6% lower than in December 2021, ransomware-related incidents in Europe have significantly increased and tensions between Russia and Ukraine are only poised to exacerbate attacks.
"We expect to see ransomware continue to dominate the threat landscape and further international law enforcement efforts aimed at the groups causing the greatest problems," Usher added.
Operations of California's Solano Partner Libraries and St. Helena, or SPLASH, continue to be interrupted weeks after the county's library network was targeted by a ransomware attack earlier this month, StateScoop reports.
Several rootkit-like capabilities could be obtained by threat actors through the exploitation of vulnerabilities in Windows' DOS-to-NT path conversion process, including file and process concealment and compromised prefetch file analysis, reports The Hacker News.
Open-source DevOps software project GitLab has also been impacted by the same security issue in GitHub comments that has been exploited by threat actors through Microsoft repository-linked URLs to facilitate the distribution of malware that was made to seem to originate from credible entities' official source code repositories, according to BleepingComputer.