In unusually cheery news, the amount of money that hackers managed to extract out of companies from ransomware attacks in 2024 dropped by 35% from the previous year.
The news comes from an annual crime report released by cryptocurrency tracing firm Chainalysis, which found that ransomware victims’ extortion payments totaled $814 million in 2024.
This is still a huge sum, but a drop from the year before and is the first time that ransomware revenues declined since 2022. However, the attacks can be devastating. A report this time last year revealed that one American loses their life each month directly because of a ransomware attack.
What Did the Report Reveal?
The findings suggest that law enforcement – including international collaboration – might be having an impact on how brazen hackers are being.
However, the company is also noting a trend among victims to delay payment or simply to refuse to pay at all.
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Analyzing 2024, the team found that hackers collected $321 million from July through December compared to $492 million the previous half year. This, says Chainalysis, is the biggest falloff in payments between two six-month periods that it has ever seen.
Catastrophic Hacks
While the findings are encouraging, there have still been some catastrophic ransomware attacks. In July last year, as Forbes reported, an undisclosed victim paid a record $75 million ransom to the Dark Angels.
The fallout from the Snowflake ransomware attack continued for months. Neiman Marcus admitted that data for more than 64,000 of its customers had been breached when the cloud-based data storage and analytics platform was hacked. But Ticketmaster, Santander Group, and AT&T customers were also impacted.
Microsoft released a report that saying that its customers were being completely besieged by hackers. In an annual report, the company revealed that attacks had risen 275% year-over-year between July 2023 and June 2024. However, it also revealed that the percentage of attacks that reach actual encryption phase has decreased.
Increased Caution
The report suggests that as well as companies – and organizations – ramping up their defenses, hackers are also going to ground. Lizzie Cookson, Senior Director of Incident Response at Coveware, says in the report: “We saw a rise in lone actors, but we did not see any group(s) swiftly absorb their market share, as we had seen happen after prior high profile takedowns and closures.”
She added: “The current ransomware ecosystem is infused with a lot of newcomers who tend to focus efforts on the small- to mid-size markets, which in turn are associated with more modest ransom demands.”
The investigation also found that hackers are keeping their ill-gotten gains in personal wallets – again a reflection on the growing efficiencies of law enforcement in tracking them down.
However, the report ends with a call for action, urging people working in this sphere to “build on the progress made in 2024,” because although hackers are getting less money, the attacks continue.
