November 30, 2025
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Ransomware is evolving into protection rackets

There is growing evidence that ransomware gangs are rapidly evolving into full-scale protection rackets. Ransomware gangs are increasingly returning to fleece their victims multiple times, even after the ransom has been paid.

“Despite most victims agreeing to pay the ransom, less than half who did get their systems and data back uncorrupted. And most were breached again within a year,” says security company Cybereason’s report Ransomware: the true cost to business 2024.

All of the 1008 enterprise IT professionals surveyed had been breached at least once in the past 24 months. While 84 percent paid the ‘ransom’, only 47 percent got their data and services back intact. But this new generation of ransomware attacks frequently do not stop – even once the ransom is paid. An astonishing 78 percent were breached again and 63 percent were asked to pay more the second time. In 36 percent of the cases, the second attack was carried out by the same gang that conducted the first.

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Lazarus equips two new remote access trojan weapons – September 22nd

The Lazarus group is using two new remote access trojans to target health systems’ ManageEngine vulnerabilities.

The group recently made headlines after targeting healthcare entities in Europe and the US and has since evolved its malware to exploit the CVE-2022047966 vulnerability in the ManageEngine setup, allowing for remote code execution.

Its new RAT variants, QuiteRAT and CollectionRAT, allow for the attacker to run arbitrary commands, among other capabilities.

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