In the RSA Security Conference(San Francisco) of 2020, Joel DeCapua, the special agent at FBI explained that cyber victims had paid the ransom around $140 million against the attacks of ransomware on bitcoin wallets.

$140 Million Loss As Ransomware Payments

FBI analysed the data of the last six years shared by the private companies and calculated the money paid as ransom payments through VirusTotal, online scan engine.

According to the special FBI agent, there has been around $144,350,000 worth of bitcoins paid to ransomware developers which does not include any operational costs, between 10/1/2013 and 11/7/2019. The significant amount was gained by ransomware family of Ryuk totalling $61.26 million while Crysis/Dharma gained the second spot with $24.48 million and third by Bitpaymer at $8.04 million.

The actual figure of ransom payments paid in six years is probably more than the data analysed as many ransom notes and crypto wallets did not share the data with the FBI. Also, many of the companies in the crypto space kept the cyberattacks secret to curb the impact of their stock prices.

FBI Aims To Safeguard Crypto Enthusiasts

After presenting the data of money drained through the dangerous ransomware, DeCapua advised the companies to safeguard themselves. He briefly advised the companies for.

• Deployment of Network Level Authentication through which the client must authenticate themselves before getting connected to the remote desktop server.
  

• Must aware their users of the attacks through suspicious emails, commonly known as phishing. Users must confirm the legitimacy of emails before providing confidential details.
  

• Exchanges must release the security updates regularly.

• Network monitoring tools and intrusion detection systems must be employed to detect illicit activities and traffic on the network.
  

• A tested contingency plan must include the offline backups to provide a damage control system.
  

The recent speech of FBI agent portrayed the optimism for crypto space along with safeguarding the crypto investors.

source>>https://www.cryptoknowmics.com/news/ransomware-swallows-up-140-million-according-to-fbi