There has been a staggering drop in the cyberattacks which aim to steal files with criminals instead opting for locking and blocking systems for the purpose of blackmail.
According to IBM X-Force, there has been close to a 25 percent drop in compromised records as ransomware and worms which spread this particularly grim kind of malware take precedence in the criminal world.
The security team's annual Threat Intelligence Index[1] suggests that in 2017, ransomware was seen as far more lucrative than stealing data in bulk and selling these dumps in the web's underbelly.
Ransomware, such as WannaCry[2] and NotPetya[3], infects systems most often through phishing campaigns and malicious executables.
Once a PC is compromised, the malware then encrypts files before throwing up a landing page warning that if the victim does not pay up, they will never receive a key to decrypt their systems.
While some cybersecurity firms have developed decryption software through weaknesses in ransomware coding, the future is often bleak for victims as there is no guarantee that paying up will result in a working key.
Many, still, pay up in the hopes of retrieving lost files -- especially when infections impact core services such as hospitals[4].
It is estimated that the global WannaCry ransomware campaign alone cost organizations upwards of $8 billion in damages[5] over 2017.
Record breaches, however, are still of concern. In 2017, over 2.9 records were reportedly breached, which is down from four billion in 2016.
According to IBM, human error is often at fault. In total, 70 percent of compromised records were due to misconfigurations in cloud infrastructure. This is a 424 percent increase from