Ransomware started out many years as scams where users were being tricked into paying fictitious fines for allegedly engaging in illegal online behavior or, in more serious cases, were blackmailed with compromising videos taken through their webcams by malware. The threat has since come a long way, moving from consumers to enterprises, adding data leak threats on the side and sometimes distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) blackmail.
The attacks have become so widespread that they now impact all types of organizations and even entire national governments. The cybercriminal groups behind them are well organized, sophisticated, and even innovative, always coming up with new extortion techniques that could earn them more money. But sometimes, the best way to achieve something is not to complexity but to simplify and this seems to be the case in new attacks seen by researchers from security firms Stairwell and Cyderes where known ransomware actors opted to destroy files instead of encrypting them.
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