Defending Your Data: Ransomware Vs. Wiper Malware

Simon Jelley, General Manager for SaaS Protection, Endpoint and Backup Exec at Veritas Technologies.

First, some good news: Ransomware payments are down. One estimate suggests that ransomware groups extorted 40% less money from victims in 2022 compared to 2021 ($456.8 million versus $765.6 million). Could it be that the night truly is darkest before the dawn?

Perhaps, but that’s not to say that ransomware itself is decreasing—some reports show that ransomware activity actually increased by 16% during the second half of 2022, and nearly 90% of organizations experienced ransomware attacks on their multi-cloud environments.

What this implies is that organizations seem to be getting the message that ponying up ransom payments isn’t in their best interests—even if you pay, it’s unlikely that you’ll get your data back in good shape or get it back at all. In fact, as few as 4% of those that pay end up getting all of their data back.

As further evidence that ransomware hasn’t really gone anywhere, consider a similar category of malware that could even be considered an evolution of ransomware: wipers. Like ransomware, wiper malware targets your data, but instead of encrypting it to make it (in theory) temporarily inaccessible, it simply deletes it altogether.

And reports show that wiper malware activity is also increasing—a 53% jump between just the third and fourth quarters of 2022 alone.

While ransomware has an obvious financial motive, wiper malware, much like the old-fashioned distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, is usually out to cause chaos by disrupting your business, though it has the potential to do much more long-term damage than DDoS attacks. Both are also often employed by so-called hacktivists who are out to make a point rather than make a buck. As Michael Caine playing Alfred Pennyworth so wisely put it, “Some [people] aren’t looking for anything logical, like money. They can’t be bought, bullied, reasoned or negotiated with. Some [people] just want to watch the world burn.”

The silver lining here is that the same steps used to increase your ransomware resilience can be used to increase your resilience against wiper malware. Here…