The “democratisation” of cybercrime means that even small businesses are regularly becoming victims – often of unskilled teenage hackers equipped with commodity malware whose ransom demands are startlingly modest, warned French security researcher Clement Domingo.
Domingo was speaking at a Kaspersky event in Madrid. He recently handled incident response for an architectural firm that had been breached by two hackers, aged just 15 and 18, who demanded $8,000 to unlock all of its files. (It had no backups, and paid the ransom, he said; the two had simply spotted a NAS drive exposed to the public internet.)
His talk came as Kaspersky revealed more details on a new ransomware family called FunkSec on July 1 – warning that the malware’s creators have explicitly set out to democratise access to their sophisticated Rust-based malware via customisable ransom demand pages, streamlined command and control (C2) capabilities and the use of generative AI.
