RANSOMWARE and extortion cases in Malaysia increased by 37.5% in 2022 with 11 reported cases across key sectors, a US-based cyber security company said.

Palo Alto Networks said threat actors were utilising more aggressive tactics to pressure organisations, using harassment 20 times more often last year than in 2021.

“This harassment is typically carried out via phone calls and emails targeting a specific individual, often in the C-suite, or even customers, to pressure them into paying a ransom demand,” it said in a statement today.

Palo Alto Networks also said that the 2023 Unit 42 Ransomware and Extortion Report shared insights compiled based on findings from its Unit 42’s incident response work from approximately 1,000 cases throughout the past 18 months.

“Attacks in the education and manufacturing sectors have been on the rise due to their high-value data and have emerged as top targets after experiencing relatively few incidents the previous year.

“The Russian-linked ransomware gang, Lockbit 3.0, was the leading attacker in the country. Lockbit was one of the most prolific ransomware groups of 2022 who ramped up activity around the start of the Russia-Ukraine war,” it said.

The company said ransomware groups were observed layering extortion techniques for greater impact, with the goal of applying more pressure on organisations to pay the ransom.

“Some of these tactics include encryption, data theft, distributed denial of service (DDoS) and harassment.

“Data theft, which is often associated with dark web leak sites, was the most common of the extortion tactics, with 70% of groups using it by late 2022, a 30 percentage point increase from the year prior,” it said.

Palo Alto Networks said Unit 42 researchers see a daily average of seven new ransomware victims posted on leak sites, equating to one new victim every four hours.

“There have been many notable attacks in the past year from ransomware groups, with a particular spike in attacks on schools and hospitals.

“In 2022, 30 organisations on the Forbes Global 2000 list were publicly impacted by extortion attempts,” it added. – Bernama, March 22, 2023.