Q1 2021 Crimeware Report: Post-Mortem Analysis of a Dumpster Fire

For many in the cybersecurity community, the months leading up to the end of 2020 were a dumpster fire. While doctors and nurses tirelessly cared for pandemic victims in hospitals across the world, our cybersecurity colleagues stood in the digital trenches, slugging it out to defend those same hospitals from ransomware and other nefarious threats. Often against impossible odds, including shoe-string budgets and outdated infrastructures, these teams fought the good fight. And still, the ransomware fire burned on.

At Arete, we understand the precarious, cost-benefit tightrope you walk on a quarterly, if not daily, basis when it comes to making decisions on cybersecurity. We aren’t here to sell you snake oil — for one, it doesn’t exist. For two, we stand by the fact that our data, experience, and expert insights can help tip the scales in your favor — whether you need help with incident response, negotiation, or restoration.

We’ve analyzed and tracked definitive data from more than 1,500 incident response and forensics cases over 12 months to provide unique visibility into the state of ransomware, including average payments, initial access vectors, data exfiltrations rates, and impact by sector and organizational size. What’s more, we’ve drawn out nuances from this detailed corpus of trench-fighting and created after-action reports that allow us to predict how actors will behave according to circumstance.