Record-Breaking Year for Ransomware, 2021 May Just Be Warming Up

ALREADY A RECORD-BREAKING YEAR FOR RANSOMWARE, 2021 MAY JUST BE WARMING UP

Written by Bill Conner, President and CEO at SonicWall

We live in a nation preoccupied with the setting of new records. But while many records are newsworthy, not all of this news is good news. Two examples that have recently made headlines: the mid-June heatwave that has shattered temperature records all over the American West, and the unprecedented wave of ransomware attacks currently torching networks … well, just about everywhere.

Through May, SonicWall recorded 226.3 million ransomware attacks, a 116% year-to-date increase over 2020, indicating cybercriminals’ rapidly evolving and highly profitable attack tactic.

In fact, May 2021 was victim to the highest number of ransomware attacks we have ever recorded. Increases in ransomware attacks were recorded even in countries that had already been struggling with comparatively large amounts of ransomware, such as the U.S. and the U.K., which saw ransomware attacks spike 149% and 69%, respectively.

Since the beginning of the year, it seems that 2020’s perfect storm for cybercrime in general, and ransomware in particular, has only grown in intensity. On the heels of its late 2020 performance, itself record-breaking, Bitcoin continued thundering on into 2021, reaching a new high in each of the first four months of this year.

Around the world, fortunes were being made on cryptocurrency. And ransomware, its barriers to entry lower than ever due to readily available hacking tools and platforms such as Discord, attracted an increasing number of cybercriminals looking for a quick, easy way to obtain the bitcoin that could make their fortunes.

Unfortunately, in this storm, victims are finding that lightning strikes the same place twice with frightening regularity. Companies eager to move past increasingly sophisticated and debilitating ransomware attacks, and often sheltered by high-dollar ransomware insurance policies, too often pay the ransom — only to be targeted again shortly after.

According to ZDNet, roughly eight in 10 organizations that paid ransom demands were subsequently attacked again, with nearly half of these victims saying they believe the second attack was perpetrated by the same criminals as the first.

And these criminals are continuing their shift toward soft targets, including hospitals, utilities, schools and government agencies. In early March, Broward County School District in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., set its own record when it received a $40 million ransom demand — the highest ever for an educational institution.

And in May, the Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack brought one of the nation’s largest fuel transportation networks to a standstill for nearly a week, leading to fuel shortages and panic buying.

The bombardment of ransomware attacks is forcing organizations into a constant state of defense rather than an offensive stance. And as the tidal wave of ransomware attacks continues to crush company after company, there is a lot of speculation on how to keep individual organizations safe, but no real consensus on how to move forward when it comes to combating ransomware as a whole. Law enforcement agencies and political figures continue to voice opinions that constantly contradict each other on how best to fight adversaries that know no boundaries, do not adhere to international laws and are far from the charitable operators they claim to be. The volume of targeted attacks on government organizations and enterprises that impact civilians, countries and the global economy will not end without a change in approach.

But many countries — particularly those that have been hardest hit by ransomware, such as the U.S. and the U.K. — are mobilizing to fight back. With ransomware attacks now elevated to a matter of national security, increased funding for fighting cybercrime and penalties at the national level for countries that harbor ransomware groups could finally begin to turn the tide.

Gartner Says Worldwide IaaS Public Cloud Services Market Grew 40.7% in 2020

The worldwide infrastructure as a service (IaaS) market grew 40.7% in 2020 to total $64.3 billion, up from $45.7 billion in 2019, according to Gartner, Inc. Amazon retained the No. 1 position in the IaaS market in 2020, followed by Microsoft, Alibaba, Google and Huawei.

“Hyperscale providers are continuing to build distributed cloud and edge solutions that extend the public cloud’s reach into private and on-premise locations, addressing the needs of organizations relating to data sovereignty, workload portability and network latency,” said Sid Nag, research vice president at Gartner. “This fact, coupled with reliance on the public cloud by a majority of organizations during the pandemic, drove another year of double digital market growth in 2020.”

In 2020, the top five IaaS providers accounted for 80% of the market, and nearly 90% all IaaS providers exhibited growth.

Amazon continued to lead the worldwide IaaS market with $26.2 billion of revenue in 2020 and 41% market share. slower than that of the market, with their sales growth primarily reflecting increased customer usage.

Microsoft maintained the No. 2 position in Gartner’s IaaS market share with nearly 60% growth, reaching $12.7 billion in revenue in 2020.

The global healthcare crisis and disruption in workplace environments during the pandemic era drove increased demand from existing Microsoft Azure customers to migrate mission-critical workloads, such as from healthcare applications with AI-assisted bots, digital twins in manufacturing and e-commerce in retail.

The dominant IaaS provider in China, Alibaba, grew 52.8% in 2020 with revenue surpassing $6 billion, up from $4 billion in 2019.

In 2020, Alibaba saw its highest growth rate in the education vertical at 105%, driven by downloads of Alibaba’s enterprise communication and collaboration platform DingTalk among employees and students working and studying from home.

After its second consecutive year of over 200% growth in the IaaS market, Huawei broke into the top five IaaS vendors for the first time in 2020, with $2.7 billion in revenue.

Over 90% of this revenue comes from Greater China, a region that continues to see rapid cloud market growth. “After 2019, Huawei made a hard pivot away from selling equipment to investing heavily in their cloud services business which is starting to yield results,” said Nag.

Google’s IaaS revenue grew 66% to reach nearly $4 billion in 2020. Spending from the retail, government and healthcare sectors helped drive Google’s growth in IaaS in 2020, as did their focus on supporting the development and deployment of cloud applications in both a hybrid and multicloud model.

“The era of CIOs investing in cloud IaaS and platform as a service (PaaS) discretely is long over,” said Nag. “While the cloud market will continue to grow, the real opportunity for providers comes from growth in cloud-adjacent technology markets such as edge, 5G and AI, as CIOs look to invest in technologies that address their complex and emerging use cases.”