The European Union Agency for Law Enforcement Cooperation (EUROPOL) has named ransomware as the most pressing cyber threats observed in the past 12 months. The report generated by Europol claims that ransomware has reached to a point where it has started to eclipse other areas of cybercrime such as data breaches, card fraud, and P$%^graphy.
In a surprising revelation made by Europol, more than 2 billion records linked to EU populace were found to be affected by ransomware during the last 12 months. And that’s due to the growing sophistication in the cybercrime spreading community where individual criminals are bound to form groups to deliver cybercrime-as-a-service.
Julian King, the EU Commissioner of Security Union said that he has made a note of what the security officers from Europol have discovered. And is recommending public and private entities to build up their resilience to cyber defenses in such a way that cybercrime doesn’t pay.
Dimitris Avramopoulos, the EU Commissioner for Migration, Home Affairs, and Citizenship added that cross-border cyber threats are not only threatening the citizens and economies but are also hitting the democracy in a hard way. And the only way to deal with the situation will be to enrich the EU Cyber Strategies with proactive security measures. Also, a stronger role of European agencies like ENISA and Europol is expected to increase cybersecurity on a collective note in Europe and beyond.
Dimitris also suggests that law enforcement must continue to focus on actors developing and providing the cybercrime attack tools and services responsible for the spread of ransomware, banking Trojans, and other malware. This can be done by building a trusted relationship between public and private partners, CERT communities and educating the employees of public and private sector about the change in criminal tactics like social engineering attacks and spam botnets.
