

In terms of total payments received, the NetWalker gang leads all-time in the data Cable has collected to date, with more than 3,000 payments compared to nearly 750 payments to Ryuk, the gang receiving the second most. Anyone can download the resulting database.

He’s been working to build a starting trove of information since, tracking nearly $57 million in payments so far.

He’s also hoping to team up with other security and blockchain analysis companies that track ransomware data via other means.Ī June tweet about the ransomware data gap from Katie Nickels, director of intelligence for cybersecurity company Red Canary, helped inspire Ransomwhere, Cable said. “Having public transparency around the impact of ransomware, especially as we’re proposing and considering different actions to try to combat ransomware - we’ll need a way of seeing whether those actions actually work,” Cable said in an interview with CyberScoop.Ĭable, who besides his college studies works as a security architect at the Krebs-Stamos Group consultancy and a hacker at the Defense Department’s Defense Digital Service, said he will head the crowdsourcing project in his spare time. That’s the impetus behind a project that Stanford University student and security researcher Jack Cable launched on Thursday, dubbed “ Ransomwhere,” a plan to track payments to bitcoin addresses associated with known ransomware gangs.
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That, combined with the suspicion that most victims don’t report their digital extortion payments, makes it harder for law enforcement and security firms to combat attacks, or even understand how to fight them. Ransomware has never been more of a national security concern after a string of hacks against the fuel supplier Colonial Pipeline, meat giant JBS and perhaps thousands of others compromised after a breach at a large IT firm.įew people, if any, seem to grasp the breadth and cost of the scourge, as there are no legal requirements for victims to disclose when they pay hackers to unlock their network.
