India was the second most targeted country by Ransomware in the Asia-Pacific and Japan region in 2022, according to the Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 Ransomware and Extortion Report released on Tuesday. India moved up a rank from its third position in 2021.
The report said that in India, Maharashtra was the most targeted state with 36 per cent of ransomware attacks, followed by New Delhi.
Ransomware and extortion groups are forcing their victims into a pressure cooker with the ultimate goal of increasing their chances of getting paid, said Wendi Whitmore, senior vice president and head of Unit 42 at Palo Alto Networks.
The report also highlighted the industries that are most targeted, which are manufacturing, construction, and professional legal services. The most active ransomware groups are Stormous, BianLian, and Lockbit 2.0.
The report has gathered insights from 1,000 cases over the past 18 months and found that ransomware demands are a major issue for organisations.
Unit 42 has observed that payments are as high as $7 million, with a median demand of $650,000 and a median payment of $350,000. The report also shows that effective negotiation can cause real payments to be lost.
The report also found that harassment is 20 times more common now than in 2021. The attackers use phone calls and emails to target specific individuals in the C-suite, customers, and other individuals, increasing cases of corporate ransoms.
The report also said that 30 organisations on the Forbes Global 2000 list were publicly impacted by extortion attempts in 2022.
The report also showed that attackers layer their extortion techniques to apply greater pressure on organisations and force ransom out of them.
It further explained that some of these tactics include encryption, data theft, distributed denial of service DDoS and harassment.
The report said that 70 percent of groups using it by late 2022, a 30 per cent increase from the year before, was the most common form of data theft.
India follows Australia to be second in the list to be followed by Japan and Taiwan.