Ransomware gangs are now expanding to physical threats in the real world

Date:
Fri, 01 Aug 2025 12:04:00 +0000

Description:
More than half of CEOs threatened with physical violence unless their company paid a ransom demand.

FULL STORY

Ransomware gangs seem to be getting desperate when it comes to getting
results, as besides encrypting and leaking data on the web, theyve also
started threatening CEOs with physical violence.

Cybersecurity researchers Semperis claim over the past 12 months, in 40% of ransomware incidents, the CEOs of the affected company were also physically threatened - which rises to 46% among US-based organizations.

But even paying up may not be enough, as the research found more than half (55%) of organizations who paid a demand did so multiple times, with nearly a third (29%) of those firms paying three or more times, and 15% were not even sent decryption keys, or received corrupted keys.

Physical violence

Threatening to file a regulatory complaint also seems to be a popular tactic, Semperis found. It was observed in 47% of attacks, rising to 58% in the US.

In 2023, the infamous BlackCat ransomware group reported one of its victims
to the SEC to get them to pay, with this tactic due to growing regulatory requirements around cyber incident reporting, including the SECs four-day disclosure rule for publicly traded companies.

Ransomware has been around for more than a decade, and during this time it
has evolved multiple times. It started with just encryption, which companies quickly mitigated by keeping offline backups of all the key data.

Criminals then responded by stealing the data first, and threatening to
release it on the dark web unless a payments made. This strategy, known as double extortion works rather well, so well in fact that some criminals abandoned the encryption part altogether and are just focused on stealing files.

However, many companies refuse to budge, forcing the criminals into even
bigger extremes.

In some cases, they pair the encryption of the back-end with a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) on the front-end, bringing the entire business to a screeching halt. Phone calls to victim organizations were also observed in a couple of cases, and now, we can add physical threats to the mix, as well.

While some circumstances might leave the company in a non-choice situation,
we should acknowledge that it's a downpayment on the next attack," noted
Mickey Bresman, CEO of Semperis.

"Every dollar handed to ransomware gangs fuels their criminal economy, incentivizing them to strike again. The only real way to break the ransomware scourge is to invest in resilience, creating an option to not pay ransom," he commented.

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Link to news story: https://www.techradar.com/pro/security/ransomware-gangs-are-now-expanding-to-p hysical-threats-in-the-real-world

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