McAfee Labs Report Highlights Ransomware Threats | McAfee Blogs

The McAfee Advanced Threat Research team today published the McAfee Labs Threats Report: June 2021.

In this edition we introduce additional context into the biggest stories dominating the year thus far including recent ransomware attacks. While the topic itself is not new, there is no question that the threat is now truly mainstream.

This Threats Report provides a deep dive into ransomware, in particular DarkSide, which resulted in an agenda item in talks between U.S. President Biden and Russian President Putin. While we have no intention of detailing the political landscape, we certainly do have to acknowledge that this is a threat disrupting our critical services. Furthermore, adversaries are supported within an environment that make digital investigations challenging with legal barriers that make the gathering of digital evidence almost impossible from certain geographies.

That being said, we can assure the reader that all of the recent campaigns are incorporated into our products, and of course can be tracked within our MVISION Insights preview dashboard.

This dashboard shows that – beyond the headlines – many more countries have experienced such attacks. What it will not show is that victims are paying the ransoms, and criminals are introducing more Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) schemes as a result. With the five-year anniversary of the launch of the No More Ransom initiative now upon us it’s fair to say that we need more global initiatives to help combat this threat.

Q1 2021 Threat Findings

McAfee Labs threat research during the first quarter of 2021 include:

• New malware samples averaging 688 new threats per minute
• Coin Miner threats surged 117%
• New Mirai malware variants drove increase in Internet of Things and Linux threats

Additional Q1 2021 content includes:

• McAfee Global Threat Intelligence (GTI) queries and detections
• Disclosed Security Incidents by Continent, Country, Industry and Vectors
• Top MITRE ATT&CK Techniques APT/Crime

We hope you enjoy this Threats Report. Don’t forget to keep track of the latest campaigns and continuing threat coverage by visiting our McAfee Threat Center. Please stay safe.