🦀 What Is Cyber Extortion

Cyber extortion is a nefarious cybercrime where threat actors exploit security vulnerabilities to breach digital security systems and gain unauthorized access to valuable assets. These assets range from confidential data and intellectual property to financial currency and critical infrastructure systems. Put simply, cyber extortion is an umbrella term for a variety of cyber crimes. It can be used whenever criminal hackers force victims to do something after compromising their systems. Ransomware is a type of cyber extortion, but there are in fact many techniques that crooks can use. Why is cyber extortion so popular? Following are nine cybersecurity predictions and trends for 2024 to be aware of, even if they don't all come to pass. 1. Increase of zero-day vulnerabilities in extortion attacks. Attackers could more often use zero-day vulnerabilities to target multiple organizations, said Dick O'Brien, principal intelligence analyst at Symantec, part of The incident highlights the serious real-world impact that cyber-extortion attacks can have. 9. 23andMe Suffers Major Data Breach. A DNA testing firm 23andMe confirmed its customers had their profile information accessed by threat actors following a credential stuffing campaign in October 2023. The threat actor claimed to have 20 million Octo Tempest is a financially motivated cybercrime group that leverages broad social engineering campaigns to compromise organizations across the globe with the goal of financial extortion. Microsoft continues to track multiple other ransomware or extortion threat actors that have purchased fraudulent accounts from Storm-1152 to enhance their If so, you are not alone. Cyber extortion is increasing, targeting individuals and businesses in an ever-increasing number of industries. To help you understand what it is and how to protect yourself against this threat, we will look at cyber extortion definition, its targets, and the methods criminals use to extort victims. Cyber extortion is an umbrella term for a wide array of cybercrimes. Cyber extortion occurs when cybercriminals threaten to disable the operations of a target business or compromise its confidential data unless they receive a payment. The two most common types of cyber extortion are ransomware and DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks. In the simplest terms, Cyber Extortion is most commonly deployed via email phishing attacks, where a victim clicks on a link or attachment containing malicious software known as ransomware. Hackers use ransomware to take a victim's data hostage, demanding payment in exchange for returning access to it. .

what is cyber extortion