June 14 Cyber News Roundup
Ransomware up 33 percent in May as new groups emerge
GRIT continues to observe year-on-year increases in the number of distinct ransomware groups operating too, with 38 unique groups claiming victims in May 2024, representing a 35.7 percent increase from May 2023, and showing increased dispersion of activity from small to big groups like Alphv/LockBit.
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Lost in the Fog: A New Ransomware Threat
On May 2, 2024, Arctic Wolf Labs began monitoring deployment of a new ransomware variant referred to as Fog. All victim organizations were located in the United States, 80% of which were in the education sector and 20% in the recreation sector.
On Windows Servers that the threat actors interacted with, Windows Defender was disabled by the threat actors. Threat actors were observed encrypting VMDK files in VM storage and deleting backups from object storage in Veeam.
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IT downtime cuts enterprise profit by 9%, says study
CIOs and CSOs would save large enterprises $200 million a year if they could eliminate downtime — and should budget more for dealing with ransomware, according to research by Splunk.
The large enterprises surveyed also spent an average of $19 million on ransomware and data extortion payouts — although they only budgeted $13.4 million.
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