Previously, in most instances, hackers have been getting revenues for selling stolen data from companies. However, in the last three years, they have been seen using another tactic: extorting money directly from their victims. They may either hold computer files to ransom or threaten to release damaging information about a victim to the public. In both instances, they request money to be paid before a certain deadline expires. One of the most famous extortion attempts is the WannaCry ransomware that came about in May 2017. The WannaCry ransomware infected hundreds of thousands of computers in over 150 countries. From Russia to the US, whole organizations were brought to a halt after users were locked out of their data, which had been encrypted. The ransomware attempted to extort users by asking for $300 to be paid to a Bitcoin address within 72 hours, after which the amount would double. There was also a stern warning of having files locked permanently if payment was not made within 7 days.
WannaCry reportedly only made $50,000 since a kill switch was discovered in its code. However, it had the potential to do lots of damage. Experts say that if the code did not include a kill switch, the ransomware would either still be around or would have claimed many computers. Shortly after WannaCry was mitigated, a new ransomware was reported. The ransomware hit computers in Ukraine, which were reported to be in the range of the tens of thousands. Russia was also affected, with computers used to monitor the Chernobyl nuclear plant being compromised, causing employees on-site to fall back to the noncomputerized monitoring means such as observation. Some companies in the US and Australia were also affected.
Prior to these international incidents, there had been local and isolated cases of ransomware at different companies. Apart from ransomware, hackers have been extorting money by threatening to hack sites. The Ashley Madison incident is a good example of this type of extortion. After failed extortion attempts, hackers exposed the user data of millions of people. The owners of the website did not take the threats that hackers had made seriously, and therefore did not pay up or shut down the website as they had been ordered. Hackers actualized their threats when they publicly released details of users that had registered on the site. Some of these people had registered using work details, such as work emails. In July, it was confirmed that the company offered to pay a total of $11 million to compensate for the exposure of 36 million users. A similar extortion case faced a United Arab Emirates bank called Sharjah in 2015. The hacker held the user data to ransom and demanded a payment of $3 million from the bank. The hacker periodically released some of the user data on Twitter after a number of hours. The bank also downplayed the threats, and even had Twitter block the account he had been using. This reprieve was short-lived as the hacker created a new account, and in an act of vengeance released the user data which contained personal details of the account owners, their transactions, and details of the entities that they had transacted with. The hacker even reached out to some of the users via text.
These incidents show that extortion attacks are on the rise and are becoming preferred by hackers. Hackers are getting into systems with a goal of copying as much data as possible and then successfully holding it to ransom for huge amounts of money. Logistically, this is viewed as simpler than trying to sell off stolen data to third parties. Hackers are also able to negotiate for more money as the data they hold is more valuable to owners than it is to third parties. Extortion attacks such as ransomware have also become effective since there is hardly any decryption workaround, other than having to pay up.