93% Of Phishing Emails Are Now Ransomware (csoonline.com)

According to the latest data from security firm PhishMe, 93% of all phishing emails as of the end of March contained encryption ransomware. The numbers underscore a growing trend in the security space as ransomware instances in phishing emails grew up by 56% since December last year. From a report: The anti-phishing vendor also counted the number of different variants of phishing emails that it saw. Ransomware accounted for 51 percent of all variants in March, up from just 29 percent in February and 15 percent in January. The skyrocketing growth is due to that fact that ransomware is getting easier and easier to send and that it offers a quick and easy return on investment. Other types of cyberattacks typically take more work to monetize. Stolen credit card numbers have to be sold and used before the cards are canceled, for example. Identity theft takes even more of a time commitment.

Comments

And what's our suggestion to friends and family?

[Thanshin]

I'm scared of my mother calling me one day telling me "I've lost every picture from all my life and a guy is asking me $10K to recover them".

By that point it will be late to tell her "shouldn't have been storing them in a disk permanently attached to your windows laptop".

But I don't know how to stop her. I won't convince her to use linux. I won't manage to teach her not to execute random crap once per year.

Should I trust hard drives to store data for decades?