Israeli security company and maker of firewalls, Check Point, is predicting a rise in the use of ransomware in 2020.
It warns that the ransomware, but will not be the standard type of random attack, with it becoming more targeted.
Writing in its bog Check Point is forecasting more sophisticated ransomware attacks coming next year across the business and the public sector: “Attackers are spending time intelligence-gathering on their victims, to ensure they can inflict maximum disruption, and ransoms are scaled up accordingly.”
Last year ransomware activity declined by 59 percent in the UK, but the SonicWall Cyber Threat Report released this summer there was a 195 percent surge in the first half of the year. This was primarily driven by criminals using Ransomware as a Service and open-source malware kits.
“Increasing reliance on public cloud infrastructure increases enterprises’ exposure to the risk of outages, such as the Google Cloud outage in March 2019. This will drive organisations to look at their existing data centre and cloud deployments, and consider hybrid environments comprising both private and public clouds”, said Check Point.
“Today’s hyper-connected world creates more opportunities for cybercriminals, and every IT environment is a potential target: on-premise networks, cloud, mobile, and IoT devices. But forewarned is forearmed: using advanced threat intelligence to power unified security architectures, businesses of all sizes can automatically protect themselves against upcoming attacks.”
