Blog
Stop Worrying and Start Isolating – The State of Ransomware 2024
By BUFFERZONE Team, 20/05/2024
Target: IT Professionals (Elementary)
Tags: Phishing, Safe Workspace®, Safe Browsing, NoCloud™ AI Anti-Phishing
Despite law enforcement disruptions to major ransomware gangs like LockBit and BlackCat, Q1 2024 marked the peak in activity, with a 21% surge compared to Q1 2023, as per Corvus Insurance [1]. Global ransomware attacks in 2023 hit a record high, up almost 70% from 2022. Despite law enforcement targeting LockBit’s infrastructure in Q1 2024, leading to reduced operations, the group is attempting to rebuild slowly. ALPHV/BlackCat’s March attack on a healthcare company caused significant damage. Nevertheless, ransomware attacks continued and even intensified, possibly due to Ransomware groups affiliates shifting to new groups. Additionally, 18 new data leak sites emerged in Q1 2024, totaling 60 active leak sites for the quarter.
Staying Safe in the Digital World
While no security solution can offer complete protection, organizations have still been affected by Ransomware attacks. Individuals and organizations must adopt preventive security measures to address this increasing threat. Such measures include:
- Educating employees on the signs of phishing emails.
- Implementing advanced application isolation technology.
- Regularly updating systems to patch vulnerabilities.
To tackle this issue, our team has developed BUFFERZONE® Safe Workspace®, a suite of zero-trust solutions designed to offer robust security measures. The suite includes Safe Mail, NoCloud™ Artificial Intelligence (AI) Anti-Phishing, SafeBridge® Content Disarm and Reconstruction (CDR), and Safe Browser, a secure browsing solution.
Safe Mail is a Microsoft Outlook plugin that uses BUFFERZONE® SafeBridge® to ensure emails are disarmed and safe from email attacks. Safe Mail ensures the attachments and links are securely opened inside BUFFERZONE® secure virtual container. The container isolates the browsing and file activity, thus keeping your computer safe from evasive attacks. By isolating threats, the next step of the attack is stopped, and the security breach caused by the human factor is minimized.
Conclusion
Ransomware and evasive malware are always coming up with new and innovative ways to avoid detection. By changing our security and adding a new prevention approach based on application isolation to the existing detection layers, we can successfully minimize the attack surface and contain the threats before they damage the organization while keeping IT simple.
References
[1] HelpNetSecurity, Ransomware activity is back on track despite law enforcement efforts, https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2024/05/07/ransomware-activity-q1-2024/
