In 2022, roughly 68 percent of the worldwide reported cyberattacks were ransomware. In the fourth quarter of 2022, nearly 155 million ransomware attacks were detected worldwide. As of 2023, the highest share of companies victimized by ransomware were in Singapore and Austria, while the United States ranked first by the number of such attacks.
Types of ransomware attacks
In the second quarter of 2023, BlackCat and Black Basta were the leading ransomware variants, with a 15.5 percent market share. In 2022, Stop/Djvu Trojan topped the list of the most commonly encountered ransomware Trojans, with over 16 percent of encounters. This Trojan locks the victim’s data on computers that use Windows OS. The second-most used type of ransomware Trojans was WannaCry, encountered by 12 percent of users worldwide.In recent years, the business model called Ransomware as a Service (RaaS) was introduced. This is when threat actors develop new malicious software and sell access to it to others. This model allows less sophisticated actors, called affiliates, to launch ransomware attacks independently.