Company News

Ride The Lightning (RTL) Blog Featured In Ediscovery Today

October 1, 2020

A recent blog post by Doug Austin of eDiscovery Today entitled “Ransomware Attacks are More Than SEVEN TIMES Higher for First Half of 2020: Cybersecurity”, featured Sensei’s Sharon Nelson’s Ride the Lightning blog.  

Excerpt:

Do you think that all of the additional workers forced into remote work because of the pandemic has made organizations more vulnerable?  I think we just got an indication that it has – a lot!

According to Bitdefender’s Mid-Year Threat Landscape Report 2020 (covered here last week by ZDNet and here by Sharon Nelson’s excellent Ride the Lightning blog), the total number of global ransomware reports increased by 715.08 percent Year-over-Year (YoY), potentially suggesting that threat actors upped their ransomware campaigns to capitalize on both the pandemic and the work-from-home context and the commoditization of ransomware-as-a-service (yes, that’s apparently a thing now).  As Bitdefender’s Report Executive Summary states:

“A defining characteristic of the first half of 2020 in terms of threats and malware is that they all played on the same theme: the pandemic. A spike in scams, phishing and malware across all platforms and attack vectors seems to have been a direct result of cybercriminals leveraging issues related to Covid-19 to exploit fear and misinformation.

This catalyst was responsible for a five-fold increase in the number of coronavirus-themed reports in the first two weeks of March alone. Then, in May and June, an average of 60 percent of all received emails were fraudulent, according to Bitdefender telemetry. Whether it was phishing scam exploiting the coronavirus, a fundraiser or a jaw-dropping offer you couldn’t resist, bad actors have pulled every trick of the trade to fool victims into providing sensitive information, installing malware, or falling prey to scams.

Read Doug’s entire blog post here.