Tech support: The rise in ransomware attacks

Yahoo Finance’s Dan Howley joins the Yahoo Finance Live panel with Tech Support: The reason we’re seeing so much ransomware.

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AKIKO FUJITA: In today's Tech Support, we are talking about ransomware attacks. Yet another one reported this week with Kaseya, affecting nearly 1,500 businesses at least reported so far. Yahoo Finance's Dan Howley is on that case for us. And Dan, you know, you're dressed the part. Last time you were dressed this way, we were talking about what to do about ransomware attacks, how to protect yourself. What about how quickly we've seen them ramped up? And what's behind that?

DAN HOWLEY: Yeah, this is my matrix outfit. I don't necessarily have a turtleneck or a cool trench coat, but let's just go with it. It's fine. So let's talk about why we're seeing this huge increase in ransomware attacks. We saw a JBS hit. We saw a Kaseya hit. We've seen the US government hit in different areas, towns, hospitals, city police departments. So what's driving that? Well, there's two factors.

One is the rise in cryptocurrency. That allows people to send money to criminals that's much harder to track. So you may have seen prior to this things like prepaid cards. And now it's really about cryptocurrency, whether that's Ethereum, Bitcoin. It really does allow for a sense of anonymity.

The other thing is that victims are actually paying these ransoms. And that's something that all of the authorities and cybersecurity experts say is a bad idea, the reason being is it puts money in the coffers of these criminal gangs. And it gets other people to say, well, I can make a buck on that, too, I guess. And so that's why we're seeing an increase.

There's also the state actor issue. So whether or not certain states-- we've talked about Russia before. We've talked about China before-- Iran, North Korea. A lot of these countries either allow for these gangs to continue to operate, or are just unwilling to do anything about them. So that's kind of where we're at as far as why.

So what can happen to prevent this? Well, one of the things is to just stop paying these people entirely. Don't provide them with the kind of money that they're looking for. The other is to make it illegal for organizations to pay ransom. And there's been some people in different levels of government, states, and in the national level who are saying we should make it a crime. And we saw, obviously, Colonial Pipeline, they paid that ransom. JBS paid a ransom. Hospitals have paid ransom.

And it's turned out now that we're looking at, in the case of Kaseya, this $70 million ransom that they're seeking, to have these companies unlock basically or have their files unlocked. And so one of the things we're not seeing in this case in particular is a kind of two-stage ransom attack where they will lock down the files. And then they'll also take files and then say, hey, we're going to put these on the internet if you don't give us money. Not only will you not be able to get your files back, but we're just going to spread around all sorts of private information about your customers that you may or may not want out there.

So it's a two-stage attack. Not in this case, though. But we are going to continue to see these kinds of attacks continue moving forward, unless there's some kind of legislation that prevents people from paying ransoms, or we seek some kind of legislation requiring companies to adhere to stringent cybersecurity hygiene. That means making sure that they have the latest patches and updates, making sure that they ensure their employees are aware of what to do or what not to do in the case of attacks, and making sure that they use the proper types of software to prevent this. But until we see that, you're going to continue to see people dressed like me hacking into people's internet.