- Ransomware attacks increase quickly in the United States
- Pirates focus on exfiltration of data
- Oil and gas are becoming more and more popular among threat actors
The United States is now the capital of the world of ransomware. The majority of attacks target American organizations and in the past year, the number of attacks has increased considerably. These are the conclusions that have been drawn in the Ransomware 2025 report, published by Zscaler Kenencelabz cybersecurity experts.
Using proprietary data, as well as samples and information collected on the Internet wider, Zscal researchers have determined that 50%of all ransomware attacks in last year occurred in the United States, “exceeding” Canada (5%) and the United Kingdom (4%).
Even when you combine all the attacks reported in the 15 most targeted countries, there are less than 3,671 that have been reported in the United States.
Fly without encryption
The number of attacks also increases. One year on the other, it increased by 146% in the United States, with manufacturing (1,063), technology (922) and health care (672) being the most targeted industries, mainly for the potential for operational disturbance, the sensitivity of the flying data and the risk of regulatory pressure and damage to the reputation. Businesses in the oil and gas sector have increased “amazing” increase in ransomware attacks – 900% in annual shift.
Zscaler also said that ransomware actors are increasingly abandoning the attacking part of the attack and focus only on data theft. In the past year, 10 of the largest ransomware groups have exfiltrated 238 TB of data, up 92% compared to 123 TB of last year.
Currently, the biggest names in the space of ransomware are Ransomhub (833 victims), Akira (520) and Clop (488), but the number of threat actors also increases. In the past year only, the researchers identified 34 families of newly active ransomware, bringing the total number up to 425.
Ransomware “flourishes” in environments with fragmented security, limited visibility, implicit confidence and obsolete inherited architectures, underline them Zscal, urging companies to mitigate these threats by adopting an architecture of fighting the native zero sheet of the cloud.
