Barracuda Network: Ransomware attacks increased 64% over the past year

Ransomware attacks increased 64% over the past year, targeting municipalities, health care, education, infrastructure, and more, according to Barracuda Network’s annual ransomware report.

Ransomware attacks have surged in 2021. Cybercriminals are also expanding their targets, shifting focus to critical infrastructure and deep-rooted software supply chain attack campaigns, which can cause long-lasting devastation.

In the past 12 months, Barracuda researchers have identified and analyzed 121 ransomware incidents, a 64% increase in attacks, year over year. Cybercriminals are still heavily targeting municipalities, health care, and education, but attacks on other businesses are surging.

Attacks on corporations, such as infrastructure, travel, financial services, and other businesses, made up 57% of all ransomware attacks between August 2020 and July 2021, up from just 18% from the 2020 report. Infrastructure-related businesses account for 10% of all the attacks we studied. In fact, ransomware attacks are quickly evolving to software supply chain attacks, which reach more businesses in a single attempt.

Many of these attacks are being led by a handful of high-profile ransomware gangs. Barracuda’s analysis of ransomware attacks that occurred between August 2020 and July 2021 showed that REvil accounted for 19% of attacks, and DarkSide is known to be the cause of 8%.

Just as we have seen in the past years, the ransom amount is increasing dramatically and now the average ransom ask per incident is over 10 million dollars. Only 18% of the incidents had less than $10 million ransom asks, and 30% of the incidents had greater than $30 million dollar ransom asks.

Read the full report by Barracuda Network.