U.S. insights company shows ransomware hackers drew in $1bn across 2023

Ransomware hackers extorted $1 billion throughout 2023, according to data analytics company and blockchain platform.

The company published a report showing the extent of malicious hacking and developing trends affecting entities over the past year.

Chainanalysis provides data, software, services and research to government agencies and companies in seventy countries.

“Our data powers investigation, compliance and market intelligence software that has been used to solve some of the world’s most high-profile criminal cases and increase consumer access to cryptocurrencies securely,” the company says. place.

The report details a staggering $433 million increase in ransoms collected from victims compared to 2022, growing to the highest rate ever reached: $1 billion in 2023.

Report shows biggest ransomware attack of 2023

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) published a Cybersecurity Notice (CSA) in June last year highlighting the MOVEit vulnerability, carried out by the CL0P ransomware gang.

This would be one of the largest ransomware attacks reported and was the peak of the 2023 problem with ‘zero-day’ exploits.

What is a zero day?

He report details this as a ‘zero-day’ vulnerability that compromised multiple institutions simultaneously. The attack is so named because it gives developers no day to respond as it exploits an existing loophole in the defenses that they were unaware of.

The MOVEit trick was like finding all the keys to several company safe deposit boxes in a large digital bank vault.

The attack affected several established institutions and exploited a vulnerability in the file transfer system. The owner of the software would announce that the the service had been compromised with sensitive data, including personal data, and in some cases, banking information was in the hands of hackers.

sony, the BBC, and Flagstar Bank were among those affected. He Maine Attorney General documented that 837,390 users’ data was breached, and the report said: “Acquired information: name or other personal identifiers in combination with social security number.”

Japanese technology giant Sony also send letters to those affected stating that the company wanted to “provide them with information about a cybersecurity event related to one of our IT providers, Progress Software, which involved some of their personal information.”

“This event was limited to Progress Software’s MOVEit Transfer platform and did not impact any of our other systems.”

This would extort massive amounts of data and significantly damage Progress Software’s reputation.

US federal forces and businesses around the world will be hopeful that the number of attacks and the amount extorted will decrease throughout 2024.