The occurrence of ransomware families nearly doubled, with an increase of 172%, in the first half of 2016 compared to 2015, further establishing ransomware as a prevalent and pervasive threat.
This is according to a new Trend Micro report: The Reign of Ransomware, released yesterday, which notes during the first half of 2016, the company discovered a total of 79 new ransomware families.
Both new and old variants have caused a total of $209 million in monetary losses to enterprises so far, says the report.
"The rapid rise of ransomware cases could be a clear indication of ransomware's effectiveness in granting cyber criminals the satisfaction of easy monetary reward.
"With the rising number of ransomware cases and more enterprises continuously losing money and opting to pay ransom, we believe that the reign of ransomware will stay prevalent."
Trend Micro says it blocked and detected almost 80 million ransomware threats - 58% of those were attachments in spammed e-mail, 40% were downloads from URLs hosting ransomware or from exploit kits leading to ransomware, and 2% were actual ransomware files.
Despite that, cyber criminals continue to add new routines and new tricks to convince users to pay the ransom, it adds. For example, JIGSAW ransomware threatens to delete a number of files for every hour the ransom isn't paid. SURPRISE, another ransomware variant, increases the ransom amount if the user fails to meet the deadline, says the report.
According to Cisco, ransomware has become the most profitable malware type in history. Organisations are unprepared for future strains of more sophisticated ransomware, it says.
Fragile infrastructure, poor network hygiene and slow detection rates are providing ample time and air cover in which adversaries can operate, says Cisco.
One reason that ransomware is so effective is that the cyber security field is not entirely prepared for its resurgence, says an ICIT report, adding attacks are more successful when effective counter-measures are not in place.
Security firms are consistently developing and releasing anti-ransomware applications and decryption tools in response to the threat, it adds. However, solutions do not always exist because some encryption is too difficult to break without the decryption key, says ICIT.
Raimund Genes, chief technology officer for Trend Micro, says ransomware is capable of crippling organisations that face it, and the cyber criminals spearheading these attacks are creatively evolving on a continuous basis to keep enterprises guessing.
"It has dominated the threat landscape so far in 2016, causing immense losses to businesses across multiple industries. Enterprises must adopt multi-layered security solutions to optimally combat these threats that could attempt to penetrate corporate networks at any time."
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