We may only be six months in, but there’s little doubt that 2020 will go down in history as a rather unpleasant year. In the field of cybersecurity, the collective hurt mostly crystallized around the increasing prevalence of targeted ransomware attacks. By investigating a number of these incidents and through discussions with some of our trusted industry partners, we feel that we now have a good grasp on how the ransomware ecosystem is structured.
Structure of the ransomware ecosystem
Criminals piggyback on widespread botnet infections (for instance, the infamous Emotet and Trickbot malware families) to spread into the network of promising victims and license ransomware “products” from third-party developers. When the attackers have a good understanding of the target’s finances and IT processes, they deploy the ransomware on all the company’s assets and enter the negotiation phase.
This ecosystem operates in independent, highly specialized clusters, which in most cases have no links to each other beyond their business ties. This is why the concept of threat actors gets fuzzy: the group responsible for the initial breach is unlikely to be the party that compromised the victim’s Active Directory server, which in turn is not the one that wrote the actual ransomware code used during the incident. What’s more, over the course of two incidents, the same criminals may switch business partners and could be leveraging different botnet and/or ransomware families altogether.
But of course, no complex ecosystem could ever be described by a single, rigid set of rules and this one is no exception. ..
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