Barracuda, a trusted partner and leading provider of cloud-first security solutions, has released its fourth-annual threat research report on ransomware. The new report looks at ransomware attack patterns that occurred between August 2021 and July 2022.
For the 106 highly publicised attacks Barracuda researchers analysed, the dominant targets are still five key industries: education (15%), municipalities (12%), healthcare (12%), infrastructure (8%) and financial (6%):
• The number of ransomware attacks increased year-over-year across each of these five industry verticals and attacks against other industries more than doubled compared to last year’s report.
• While attacks on municipalities increased only slightly, Barracuda analysis over the past 12 months showed that ransomware attacks on educational institutions more than doubled and attacks on the healthcare and financial verticals tripled.
• This year, Barracuda researchers dug in deeper on these highly publicised attacks to see which other industries are starting to be targeted. Service providers were hit the most and ransomware attacks on automobile, hospitality, media, retail, software and technology organisations all increased as well.
Most ransomware attacks don’t make headlines, though. Many victims choose not to disclose when they get hit and the attacks are often sophisticated and extremely hard to handle for small businesses.
To get a closer look at how ransomware is affecting smaller businesses, the report details three examples that researchers have seen through Barracuda SOC-as-a-Service, the anatomy of each attack and the solutions that can help stop these attacks.
