Internet crimes, ransomware incidents on the rise: FBI

TEXAS - Even if your neighbor isn’t a computer hacker, it’s getting easier for them to buy a cyberattack. Ransomware attacks cost businesses millions of dollars. One security firm helps those businesses get out of situations.

A man in Texas had been running a website for years that allowed people to launch attacks on other computers that prevented them from being able to access the internet. It impacted tens of thousands of computers. Last week, 24-year-old Scott Raul Esparza was sentenced to nine months in federal prison.

"The potential harm and impact is huge," GuidePoint Security VP, DFIR & Threat Intelligence Mark Lance said.

The FBI said internet crime is on the rise and reported ransomware incidents are up 18 percent from 2022 to 2023 with the reported losses at almost $60 million.

"We know that some groups have made literally billions of dollars with a B, so, the amount of money that they're making and the level of success that they're having I think is going to continue to drive this trend," Lance said.

Lance is a ransomware attack negotiator and helps companies get out of the situation by communicating with the cybercriminal gangs and trying to get information out of them.

"Are you going to tell us how you got into the environment, in addition to giving us backup keys? Are you going to confirm deletion of information you've stolen from the environment? Regardless of whether there's any intent to pay a ransom, there's tremendous value in engaging the cybercriminals to try to understand what they've done as part of the incident so you can feed that into your investigative work streams," Lance said.

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To protect your personal information, Lance suggests:

"User awareness training, be cautious, be aware, and then leverage best practices like using multifactor authentication where you have to approve a code on your phone or something of that sort that has an additional level of complexity. That might just be enough for one threat actor to move on to the next," Lance said.

Lance said they track more than 60 different cybercriminal groups.

"These are fully fledged criminal organizations that have development and engineering teams, they have financial analysis teams that determine how much the ransom payment should be," Lance said.

The FBI does not encourage paying a ransom.

If you’re a victim of an online crime, file a report with the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center, so they can track the attackers and hold them accountable.