Why SA Is Eighth Most Attacked Country Targeted By Ransomware Cybercriminals

SA is only seventh on the list of countries that have experienced the most number of ransomware attacks, despite it only having the 32^nd largest gross domestic product in the world,” says Carlo Bolzonello, country manager for Trellix in South Africa.

This was revealed in Trellix’s Advanced Threat Research Report: January 2022, examining cybercriminal behaviour and activity related to cyber threats in the third quarter of 2021.

Bolzonello adds that corporates integrating into an open ecosystem that allows quicker response times to address and remediate threats via an open XDR API-driven platform, are likely to be able to withstand ransomware threats more effectively.

Among its findings, the research reports that despite a community reckoning to ban ransomware activity from online forums, hacker groups used alternate personas to continue to proliferate the use of ransomware against an increasing spectrum of sectors – hitting the financial, utilities and retail sectors most often, accounting for nearly 60% of ransomware detections.

“While we ended 2021 focused on a resurgent pandemic and the revelations around the Log4j vulnerability, our third-quarter deep dive into cyber threat activity found notable new tools and tactics among ransomware groups and advanced global threat actors,” said Raj Samani, Chief Scientist and Fellow at Trellix.

 

“This report provides greater visibility into the use and abuse of ransomware group personas, how nation state APT actors seek to burrow deeper into finance and other critical industries, and new Living off the Land attacks exploiting native Microsoft system tools in new ways.”