No more ransomware attacks, still a significant amount of data compromised by infostealers and around sixty data leaks. The Russian company Group-IB has just presented its analysis of the cyber year 2023 with interesting statistics on France.
The cybersecurity company first observes an increase in ransomware. According to the latter, Europe is the second region in the world targeted by these gangs, after North America. Group-IB more precisely counted 149 French organizations affected by a data leak after a ransomware attack, a figure up 45%.
Initial Access Sellers
A level almost equivalent to the German loss ratio (145 companies victims of a data leak), but well behind the United Kingdom (245). Anssi had counted, for the incidents in which it intervened, a 30% increase in ransomware attacks in France in 2023.
Group-IB, on the other hand, reports a slight decline in the business of selling initial access. If this is really the case, this is good news because it is very often these sales which subsequently allow the deployment of ransomware. Group-IB thus identified 628 initial access sales in Europe, down 7%, first in the United Kingdom (111), then in France (83), followed by Spain (70), Germany (63) and Italy (62).
Data leaks
At the same time, the sale or sharing of compromised identifiers via infostealers, this password-stealing software, is doing a little too well. Group-IB identified 25,873 French logs compromised in 2023 on “cloud of logs”, these free sharing spaces hosted in particular on Telegram messaging, compared to 26,622 logs in 2022. Likewise, it identified 69,000 French logs compromised on markets illegal, intended for sale, up 23%.
It is probably compromised identifiers on this type of site which allowed the compromise of several thousand CAF accounts, information which recently hit the headlines. Finally, the cybersecurity company counted a total of 64 data leaks in France in 2023, the hardest hit country in Europe, ahead of Spain (62) and Italy (52). “Email addresses, phone numbers and passwords present the highest level of risk, as this data can all be exploited to carry out different types of attacks,” recalls Group-IB.