With Brazil already facing an overwhelming wave of ransomware attacks, Hilmar Becker, Country Manager, F5 networks, Brazil, warns of a switch in tactics by threat actors – leaving organisations even more exposed.

Throughout 2023, a harsh reality set in.

The ever-evolving threat landscape has ransomware continuing to wreak havoc.

Brazil remains in a prominent position in relation to this threat: we are the fourth largest ransomware target in the world, according to a report released in the first half of this year.

Only the US, UK and Spain beat our market in this regard.

The accelerated digitalization of the Brazilian economy is not always accompanied by alignment with the best practices of digital security, which increases the vulnerability of companies to these types of attacks.

For years, the practice of encrypting data and holding it hostage until a payment was made was the hallmark of ransomware attacks. The victim’s dilemma was quite simple: pay the ransom or risk losing access to critical data.

To maintain their effectiveness, ransomware gangs have started to innovate with different tactics.

This is the case of double extortion, in which not only is data encrypted, but also stolen information is threatened to be publicly exposed or sold on the dark web.

The first case of this modality happened in 2019.

Shortly after, in 2020, triple extortion began to make the news, which takes double extortion a step further, taking advantage of confidential information about customers, relatives, or other entities related to the victim.

This is an advanced level of blackmail that starts from the attack on the organization to, at another time,

trigger actions pulverized by all the people who had their data exposed.

In recent months, cybercriminals have introduced yet another technique to their arsenal: unencrypted attacks.

In the face of the overwhelming wave of ransomware affecting Brazil, it has become commonplace for companies to keep backups of their data, and decryption tools are being created to neutralize ransomware variants.

This advocacy has changed digital gangs. Thus,…