SonicWall recorded a 148% increase in global ransomware attacks through the
third quarter of 2021. With 495 million ransomware attacks logged by the
company this year to date, 2021 will be the most costly and dangerous year on
record.
This month, the current U.S. administration hosted a global ransomware summit to pledge ‘all national
tools’ to stop cyberattacks on critical sectors. Leading governments, including
the UK, India, Australia, Germany and France, as well as the European Union,
attended. SonicWall’s latest research now confirms leaders have cause for
concern.
“As we see it, ransomware is on a nearly unimaginable upward trend, which poses
a major risk to businesses, service providers, governments and everyday
citizens,” said SonicWall President and CEO Bill Conner. “The real-world damage
caused by these attacks is beyond anecdotal at this point. It’s a serious
national and global problem that has already taken a toll on businesses and
governments everywhere. I’m hopeful that the recent global ransomware summit is
the next step toward a greater response at global, national and state levels.”
Ransomware rise not slowing
2021 has been the most active year for ransomware on record – and is showing no
sign of slowing. After posting a groundbreaking high in June (78.4 million),
these malicious attacks continue to see aggressive growth in Q3.
“The techniques deployed by ransomware actors have evolved well beyond the
smash-and-grab attacks from just a few years ago,” said SonicWall Vice
President of Platform Architecture Dmitriy Ayrapetov. “Today’s cybercriminals
demonstrate deliberate reconnaissance, planning and execution to surgically
deploy toolchains targeting enterprise and government infrastructure. This
results in larger victims and leads to higher ransoms.”
With 190.4 million ransomware attempts in Q3 alone, this makes it the highest
quarter ever recorded by SonicWall, nearly eclipsing the 195.7 million total
ransomware attempts logged during the first three quarters of 2020.
“While the world has been attempting to return to normal in a stop-and-go
fashion, cybercriminals have never let up, driving ransomware campaigns to
record numbers through the first three quarters of 2021,” said Conner. “These
criminal organizations will continue to launch highly sophisticated
cyberattacks that are designed to target organizations and business with weak
or lax security controls.”
Despite movements to secure cyber infrastructures from respective national
governments, the U.K. has seen a 233% surge in the number of ransomware
attacks, and the U.S. has witnessed a 127% year-to-date increase.
All told, SonicWall logged 1,748 ransomware attempts per customer through Q3 –
the equivalent to 9.7 ransomware attempts per customer each business day.
SonicWall predicts that year-end 2021 ransomware totals will near 714 million,
a staggering 134% year-over-year increase.
“As long as organizations continue to overlook or fail to implement
cybersecurity best practices to reduce their attack surface, ransomware groups
will only increase investments in time, resources and money for launching
campaigns that result in massive payouts,” said Ayrapetov.
Patented RTDMI technology finding more new variants than ever
SonicWall’s patented Real-Time Deep Memory InspectionTM (RTDMI) technology
discovered 307,516 never-before-seen malware variants (+73%) during the first
three quarters of 2021, with an average of 1,126 discoveries per day. If there
is still a consistent number of attacks, alongside rapid diversification,
nations will need to start addressing malignant cybercrime sooner rather than
later.
Included as part of SonicWall’s cloud-based Capture Advanced Threat Protection
(ATP) sandbox service, RTDMITM leverages proprietary memory inspection and CPU
instruction-tracking with machine-learning capabilities. This allows Capture
ATP with RTDMI to become increasingly efficient at recognizing and mitigating
cyberattacks never seen by anyone in the cybersecurity industry – including
threats that do not exhibit any malicious behavior and hide their weaponry via
encryption.
ICSA Labs issues SonicWall third straight ‘perfect score’
As secured previously, SonicWall ATP has earned its third consecutive ‘perfect
score’ in the ICSA Labs Advanced Threat Defense (ATD) testing for Q3 2021.
During 28 days of testing, ICSA Labs subjected Capture ATP to 653 malicious
samples and 695 innocuous apps. As a result, Capture ATP detected 100% of
malicious files sent through the system while ignoring harmless apps, thus
generating zero false positives. SonicWall has now received seven consecutive
ICSA Labs ATD certifications.
