Last Wednesday, the European police agency (Europol) said that global ransomware attacks are in decline, but other similar malicious raids are becoming more intense and are focused on more profitable businesses, with data encryption
Europol has expressed concern about the rise of “self-generated explicit material” produced by underage children, who then share sexual images and videos with peers via smartphones, making them vulnerable to sex offenders.
Furthermore, as we mentioned above, ransomware attacks on individual citizens are demonstrably decreasing, but the bad news is that they are becoming increasingly bold.
At this point, it is good to clarify that ransomware is a type of softwareused by cybercriminals to steal money from users online.
One of the most notable ransomware attacks occurred in March of last year, when the SamSam paralyzed the southeastern US city of Atlanta for six days. Although the hackers demanded a ransom of about $50,000, Atlanta spent more than $2.6 million responding to the attack. The US Department of Justice subsequently blamed two Iranian hackers for installing ransomware on the systems of organizations in the US and Canada. They did this by encrypting their operations and cutting off access from the owners until they paid the ransom demanded in bitcoin.
Globally, losses caused by ransomware increased by 60%, according to data from the Online Trust Alliance.
It seems that corporate data remains a key target for all types of attacks. Attacks that delete corporate data have already doubled in the first half of 2019 and, as Europol reports, are mostly focused on the construction sector.
Another area that is evolving seems to be the online sexual exploitation of children, with children themselves contributing to the problem as they have greater access to smartphones. Legally, they said, when a 14-year-old has an “inappropriate” image of his girlfriend, who is a year younger, on his smartphone, it can be considered sexual abuse material.
