Ransomware continues to evolve as a threat to businesses. Shifting from isolated companies, designers and users of ransomware are now instead looking to infect the organizations than handle data and services for wider groups. Called managed service providers, these companies provide a wide assortment of IT services including data storage and backup to local governments, health organizations, or other businesses that prefer to outsource their IT needs, according to an article in ProPublica.
With large amounts of data from a wide variety of companies on hand, a single effective ransomware attack on an MSP can be devastating to its customers. “Those are the targets they’re going after because they know that those individuals would be more apt to pay because they want to get those services back online for the public,” FBI spokeswoman Melinda Urbina told ProPublica.
Observes Chris Bisnett, chief architect at Huntress, of ransomware attacks on MSPs, “It’s one thing if I have 50 computers that are ransomed and encrypted and I can fix them. There’s no way I have time to go and do thousands of computers all at the same time when I’ve got all these customers calling and saying: ‘Hey, we can’t do any business, we’re losing money. We need to be back right now.’ So the likelihood of the MSP just saying, ‘Oh I can’t deal with this, let me just pay’ goes up.”
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