2023-11-29 17:12:07
The number of cyberextortion victims jumped by 46% in 2023, indicates the annual report from Orange Cyberdefense, the cybersecurity branch of the Orange telecom group, which employs 3,000 experts in a dozen countries.
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Large companies are the most impacted by cyber extortion (40% of cases), followed by small (25%) and medium-sized (23%), notes this study published Wednesday, which brings together global data between October 2022 and September 2023.
“SMEs are increasingly targeted: they represented 48% of victims, 8 points more than in 2022,” commented to AFP Hugues Foulon, CEO of Orange Cyberdefense, one of the European leaders in cybersecurity. .
Cyber extortion threats consist of extorting money from a victim through cyber action (data encryption, disclosure of confidential data, blocking of access, etc.).
More than half of the organizations victimized by cyberextortion are headquartered in the United States, but their numbers have almost doubled in India (+97%), Oceania (+73%) and Africa (+70%).
France, in 13th place and therefore far from being among the countries most affected in 2022-2023, thus experienced a wave of ransomware attacks, which paralyzed large hospitals (Versailles, Corbeil-Essonnes) and communities, including Marseille and Lille.
There are more and more attackers: in 2023, if 25 groups of hackers specializing in cyberextortion disappeared, 23 survived from one year to the next and 31 new ones emerged.
In addition to the lure of profit, more and more cyberattackers are motivated by ideological or political causes. These “hacktivists”, a contraction of hackers and activists, use techniques of espionage, sabotage, disinformation and extortion.
They are particularly targeting Europe, which suffered 85% of their attacks in 2023, followed by North America (7%) and the Middle East (3%).
Most of the countries targeted by large-scale attacks are geographically close to the war against Ukraine: Ukraine itself, Poland and Sweden were the most affected countries, underlines this report carried out before the start of the war between Israel and Hamas.
Most of these are denial of service attacks – a flood of requests that congest computer systems – with also attacks intended to shape perceptions through false information. Among the most active groups, the Russian-speaking NoName057(16) and Anonymous Sudan.
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