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“May represents a watershed moment for Ransomware across the globe with a significant increase in the attack success rate, with a 154% increase over 2022. Notably, we saw a concerted effort to attack law firms as attackers placed increasing emphasis on data exfiltration. The value of the data continues to climb as cyber criminals look for new ways to extort organizations and their clients. This explains the 233% increase in the services industry this month.

We continue to see specific targeting of healthcare, technology, education and government with increases of 81%, 57%, 42% and 33% respectively during May. Unreported attacks are now 5 times (489%) more than reported attacks. While down from a high of 10 last month, this is a factor of the large volume of reported attacks rather than any material change in unreported attacks, which remained relatively constant at 323.

In terms of variants, this month we saw LockBit and BlackCat continue to dominate with 18.4" and 17.6% respectively, very similar to last month. This is consistent with unreported attacks, also dominated by LockBit and BlackCat, with 39.7% and 13.8% respectively.

Finally, illegal networks now dominate exfiltration techniques with 97% of all attacks, with a large majority originating and exfiltrating data to China 42% of the time, with Russia at 10%. We attribute the lower exfiltration to Russia due to the effect of sanctions, making it difficult to procure, launch and exfiltrate data to this nation.”