FINAL WORD week ,” DeGrippo said , highlighting that the last year had seen the emergence of two similar types of malware that work together .

“ The first is the age of the modular downloader . These downloader malware samples essentially get on a machine and then they download second , third and later stage payloads , meaning that the threat actor can make a decision about what is actually put on that machine in the end .

“ Something you ' ve all been hearing a lot about is , of course , ransomware . What we ' ve noticed is that these operator control downloaders are typically the delivery vehicle for ransomware when the threat actor makes the decision that ransomware is the right choice .”

Most detrimental types of malware for enterprises

“ It really depends on what your operations look like day to day – a banking trojan which steals money out of a bank account may be really devastating for some businesses if they operate on a really tight cash flow , whereas if there is ransomware on a few machines they might be able to turn those around quickly ,” DeGrippo said .

However , ransomware in large-scale deployment has been ‘ absolutely devastating ’ for organisations . Historically , ransomware would be on one machine and , while inconvenient , could generally be taken care of the by the IT team .

“ The new ransomware landscape is about a much more deliberate and strategic approach , where the threat actors are looking to ransom an entire company , their entire business operations and shut that whole organisation down at once in order to get a much larger ransom payment ,” said DeGrippo .

“ We used to see US $ 100 to US $ 800 for ransoms . Now we ' re seeing ransoms in the millions , because what they ' re able to ransom is no longer just files , but an entire company ' s ability to operate .”

How successful threat actors are in obtaining these ransoms

“ Typically in my line of work we look to stop these things before they ever get to those end-users but , from what I have seen in the media , it does appear that a lot of the very sophisticated ransomware actors are able to extract a decent amount of the ransoms that they deploy ,” said DeGrippo .

However , there is question around the culpability of an organisation that pays a ransom due to various international laws . Organisations need to ensure they have a plan for how they will deal with incidents and ransomware in a pandemic .

“ We don ' t just want an incident response plan , we want an incident response plan for the usual things , plus ransomware , plus a pandemic . I don ' t think a lot of organisations are prepared that way so they need to work on that today .”

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