Kaspersky Lab’s Global Research and Analysis Team researcher has uncovered information on malware known as Ransomware attacking India.
Ransomware is a type of malicious software used by cybercriminals that’s designed to extort money from their victims, either by encrypting data on the disk or by blocking access to the system. Typically, ransomware will either lock the computer to prevent normal usage or encrypt the documents and files on it to prevent access to saved data. Ransomware is commonly installed by triggering a vulnerability in the victim’s computer, which is generally exploited by users inadvertently opening a phishing email or accessing a malicious website that was created by the attackers.
“According to Kaspersky Lab report, India takes the first place in the list of countries that were attacked by Teslacrypt ransomware in March-May 2016 and ranked fourth in the countries that was attacked by Locky ransomware during the same period,” said Vitaly Kamluk, Director, Global Research & Analysis Team, APAC, Kaspersky Lab.
The top five countries that were attacked by Teslacrypt ransomware with the highest number of users: India (11674), Vietnam (9070), Russian Federation (3024), Mexico (2956), and Turkey (2062) and Locky ransomware attacks statistics includes: Italy (1599), Germany (594), France (565), India (564) and United States (344)
This year Kaspersky Lab experts registered ransomware distribution in different parts of India where Karnataka (36.58%) was the most affected state with ransomware with Tamil Nadu (16.72 %) taking the next rank. Next came Maharashtra (10.86%), followed by Delhi (10.00%), West Bengal (6.70%), Uttar Pradesh (5.33%), Telangana (4.54%), Kerala (3.87%), Gujarat (2.35%) and Haryana (1.96%) at the last rank.
“As a general advice we recommend not to pay cybercriminals as there’s no guarantee you’ll get the encryption key,” says Vitaly Kamluk, Director, Global Research & Analysis Team, APAC, Kaspersky Lab.
