On September 15, FBI published a new Public Service Announcement urging victims of ransomware to report the attacks to the them. Every ransomware report helps the FBI “gain a more comprehensive view of the current threat and its impact on U.S. victims”.
Ransomware creators are currently targeting businesses, not only individuals, causing service disruptions, financial loss, and in some cases, permanent loss of valuable data. In the first months of 2016, FBI reports that the “global ransomware infections were at an all-time high”, estimating 100,000 computers a day being compromised by one ransomware variant. However, an exact number of individual or business victims cannot accurately be identified because many of the ransomware attacks go unreported.
“All ransomware variants pose a threat to individual users and businesses. Recent variants have targeted and compromised vulnerable business servers (rather than individual users) to identify and target hosts, thereby multiplying the number of potential infected servers and devices on a network.”
CONTINUE READING at: https://www.ic3.gov/media/2016/160915.aspx