India is 6th most-affected country by ransomware in Google's list
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New Delhi: India is the sixth most affected country by ransomware. Other nations in the top 10 areSouth Korea, Vietnam, China, Singapore, India, Kazakhstan, the Philippines, Iran, and the UK. The Google report analysed over 80 million samples from last year and a half to arrive at the conclusions.
It is the first Ransomware Activity Report by VirusTotal, which was acquired by Google in September 2012.
ThreatIntel Strategist Vicente Diaz said that the report is designed to help researchers, security practitioners and the general public understand the nature of ransomware attacks while enabling cyber professionals to better analyse suspicious files, URLs, domains, and IP addresses, reported IANS.
Google Chrome OS cloud-first platform has had no reported ransomware attacks. And in most cases, hackers are using fresh or new ransomware samples, said the report.
He added that the first two quarters of 2020 saw peaks of ransomware activity. And hackers are not only demanding money but threatening to reveal sensitive or valuable information if victims do not pay or choose to contact law enforcement.
The high activity in the first half of 2020 was due to the ransomware-as-a-service group GandCrab. Its prevalence decreased dramatically in the second half.
The report states that at least 130 different ransomware families were active in 2929. 30,000 clusters of malware that looked and operated in a similar fashion were found in the first half of 2021. There is a constant baseline of ransomware activity of around 100 families that never stops.
