Companies employing less than 1000 people, classed as small and medium businesses (SMBs), suffered cyber extortion attacks 4.2 times more often than larger enterprises. Diana Selck-Paulsson, the lead security researcher at OCD, said that the large number of SMBs in the overall number of cyber extortion victims could be explained by the fact that threat actors have turned away from ultra-targeted attacks – also called ‘big game hunting.’ “What we see, and what our victimology data confirmed, is that nowadays, threat actors compromise a network and only then scan for targets they could extort,” she explained during the report’s launch event in Antwerp, Belgium, on July 2.

Source: Infosecurity Magazine – Information Security & IT Security