Ransomware:

Victims paid 1.1 billion dollars in ransom worldwide

Last year, victims of cyberattacks using ransomware paid the equivalent of more than one billion euros in ransom for the first time. This is according to the "Crypto Crime Report 2024" by analysis company Chainalysis. However, the actual damage caused by ransomware is much higher, as the report only records the ransom payments made, but not the economic impact of lost productivity and repair costs associated with the attacks.

In a ransomware attack, the victims are usually first spied on by the cybercriminals. The victims' IT systems are then encrypted and decryption is only promised against payment of a ransom. Increasingly, the threat of publishing previously stolen data is also being used to put victims under additional pressure.

Cyber criminals make their ransom demands almost exclusively in Bitcoin because they expect the cryptocurrency to provide a high degree of anonymity. However, all transactions in the distributed Bitcoin database ("blockchain") are publicly visible.

Lower willingness to pay
Chainalysis explained that many victims are now refusing to pay the ransom demands. For example, the entertainment and casino group MGM did not pay a ransom after a ransomware attack, but suffered an estimated loss of over 100 million dollars.

According to Chainalysis, the total ransom amount of the equivalent of 1.1 billion dollars is based on a "conservative estimate". Currently, the ransomware landscape is constantly expanding, which makes it difficult to monitor every incident or track all ransom payments made in cryptocurrencies. The ransom amount is likely to increase if new suspicious Bitcoin addresses are discovered over time.

Short-term distraction due to war in Ukraine
For the year 2022, Chainalysis was only able to determine a ransom amount of 567 million dollars, while at least 983 million dollars were paid to the extortionists in 2021. The interim decline in 2022 is presumably due to geopolitical events such as Russia's attack on Ukraine. "This conflict has not only disrupted the operations of some cyber actors, but has also shifted their focus from financial gain to politically motivated cyber attacks aimed at espionage and destruction."

Sharp decline in other criminal crypto transactions
Despite the increase in ransom payments in connection with ransomware, the Chainalysis report records a sharp decline in other criminal crypto transactions. In 2023, the value received from illegal cryptocurrency addresses fell significantly and amounted to the equivalent of 24.2 billion dollars. For 2022, Chainalysis determined illegal value transactions of the equivalent of 39.6 billion dollars.

The calculated total of criminal crypto transactions includes values sent to addresses that Chainalysis has identified as illegal. Values stolen in crypto hacker attacks were also taken into account. However, the criminal crypto transactions worth 24.3 billion dollars only accounted for 0.34 percent of the total transfer volume on the observed blockchains.