Blackfog Ransomware Roundup – A record breaking Jan for attacks

After a record breaking 2022 we start January with yet another record, this time the highest January on record with 33 attacks, a 22% increase over 2022. We also start 2023 with new statistics and now include unreported attacks so we can see the scope of the problem. This month we see that 478% of attacks have gone unreported, a growing trend we have seen over the past year.

We also start 2023 with education leading the way with 10 attacks, 30% of the total for the month. This continues the trend we saw from 2022 followed closely by healthcare and government with 8 and 6 attacks respectively.

January also saw some big changes in data exfiltration, which is dominated by China, representing 36% compared to Russia at 9%. As in 2022 we see that exfiltration is now the dominant technique for ransomware and was involved in 88% of all attacks in January.

Lastly, we see that LockBit continues to be dominant variant, and expect this to increase further over the coming months and was involved in 18.8% of reported attacks, but crucially 32.6% of unreported attacks. We expect to see this reflected in next month’s statistics as we see some pull through from unreported to reported.