Microsoft releases its second edition of Cyber Signals tracking ransomware’s new business model

• The second edition of Cyber Signals focuses on the rise of the ransomware-as-a-service economy and how it has evolved to become a dominant business model
• The report includes insights and recommendations on how businesses can better pre-empt and disrupt extortion threats, such as building credential hygiene, auditing credential exposure, and reducing the attack surface

ASIA PACIFIC — August 23, 2022 — Microsoft today released its second edition of Cyber Signals, a regular cyberthreat intelligence brief, spotlighting security trends and insights gathered from Microsoft’s global security signals and experts. The specialization and consolidation of the cybercrime economy have fueled ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS), becoming a dominant business model, enabling a wider range of criminals, regardless of their technical expertise, to deploy ransomware. This edition of Cyber Signals provides insights on the evolving factors shaping the extortion segment of the cybercrime economy, and the influential rise of RaaS powering ransomware attacks. 

The RaaS economy allows cybercriminals to purchase access to ransomware payloads and data leakage as well as payment infrastructure. Ransomware “gangs” are in reality RaaS programs like Conti or REvil, used by many different actors who switch between RaaS programs and payloads. This industrialization of cybercrime has created specialized roles, like access brokers who sell access to networks. A single compromise often involves multiple cybercriminals in different stages of the intrusion. 

Key findings shared within the report include:

• Over 80% of ransomware attacks can be traced to common configuration errors in software and devices
• Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit directed the removal of more than 531,000 unique phishing URLs and 5,400 phish kits between July 2021 and June 2022, leading to the identification and closure of over 1,400 malicious email accounts used to collect stolen customer credentialsⁱ
• Median time for an attacker to access a person’s private data if they fall victim to a phishing email is one hour, 12 minutesⁱ
• For endpoint threats, the median time for an attacker to begin moving laterally within a corporate network if a device is compromised is one hour, 42 minutesⁱ
• Guidance on how businesses can better pre-empt and disrupt extortion threats, by building their credential hygiene, auditing credential exposure, reducing the attack surface, securing their cloud resources and identities, better preventing initial access, and closing security blind spots.

Vasu Jakkal, Corporate Vice President, Security, Compliance, Identity, and Management at Microsoft, said: “It takes new levels of collaboration to meet the ransomware challenge. The best defenses begin with clarity and prioritization, that means more sharing of information across and between the public and private sectors and a collective resolve to help each other make the world safer for all. At Microsoft, we take that responsibility to heart because we believe security is a team sport.”

Microsoft’s threat intelligence provides visibility into threat actors’ actions. With a broad view of the threat landscape – informed by 43 trillion threat signals analyzed daily, combined with the human intelligence of more than 8,500 Microsoft experts – threat hunters, forensics investigators, malware engineers, and researchers – Microsoft is able to see first-hand what organizations are facing, and is committed to helping businesses put that information into action to pre-empt and disrupt extortion threats.

For more information on the RaaS landscape and its evolution, check out the Cyber Signals microsite and report, as well as the Microsoft Security blogpost on this. To better understand the cybercrime gig economy and how businesses can protect themselves, visit the Microsoft Security blog. 

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