According to FortiGuard Labs statistics, average weekly ransomware activity was more than tenfold higher in June 2021 than a year ago. Over the course of a year, this shows a continuous and overall steady increase.

When looking at the root cause of these attacks, ransomware was by far the most prominent, accounting for a whopping 54.95% of breaches. Ryuk stood out above the rest, repeatedly appearing in breach disclosures and accounting for 8.64% of ransomware-related breaches, followed by Maze (6.17%), Conti (3.7%) and REvil/Sodinokibi (3.09%).

Serious players in the ransomware scene don’t use malware for which decryption tools are publicly available, however. At this point, incident response consultants may be able to determine how the actor was able to gain access to the victim organization’s infrastructure but that is heavily dependent upon factors like the actor’s “dwell time”