In recent months, hundreds of Swiss companies and governments have fallen victim to “ransomware” cyberattacks. It’s a real industry. Globally, cybercrime could cost $10 trillion by 2025, according to Forbes magazine.
The ‘ransomware’ ecosystem has evolved significantly by 2022 with cybercriminals moving from large groups that dominate the landscape, such as the infamous Hive or BlackCat, to smaller and flexible on-demand activities, attracting less attention from law enforcement agencies.
Over the years, cybercriminal groups have evolved in their modus operandi. They are becoming more and more professional. They pool their resources and work together all over the world.
Criminal “kit”
For Olivier Spielmann, Senior Vice President of Global Managed Detection and Response at Kudelski Security, hackers have become service providers. From sending emails to looking for vulnerabilities in software on Microsoft or macOS, to money laundering, cybercriminals each have their own specialization.
“It’s a kit. You pay for the number of victims. Generally, the provider of the ‘service’ gets a percentage of the margin on ransom transactions,” Olivier Spielmann described Monday in La Matinale de la RTS.
Partial statistics
The National Center for Cybersecurity (NCSC) does not have sufficient data to reliably estimate the amounts paid. The NCSC has opened a desk where private individuals and SMEs can voluntarily report cyber incidents.
The statistics are partial, but cybercriminals act the same way. According to Pascal Lamia, deputy federal delegate for cybersecurity, the amounts requested vary depending on the profile of the victim.
>> Read also: Should cyber attacks, sudden and unpredictable, be insured?
The need for a greater response
“Cybercrime is completely horizontal in the criminal ecosystem. The resources are enormous. If, on the other hand, states do not set up platforms where police, justice, academia and civil society can interact very easily and in a very operational way, we are not adapted to the threat,” estimates Stéphane Duguin, director of CyberPeace Institute, based in Geneva.
The problem is “big”, but the policy is “starting to move”, in particular with the creation of a Federal Agency for Cybersecurity, estimates Gerhard Andrey, national councilor (Les Verts / FR) and entrepreneur in the digital world. But he believes the federal defense ministry was “not the right place” to set up such a service.
According to him, there is a “risk of insufficient trust” when it is necessary for a company to report a cyber attack, because the NCSC is in the same department as the intelligence service. Gerhard Andrey is in favor of requiring critical infrastructures, in a broad sense, to report to the Confederation the cyber-attacks they suffer.
In 2022, the National Security Center in Switzerland received 34,000 reports to its counter, 159 of which were ransomware, more than double compared to 2020.
>> Gerhard Andrey’s interview in La Matinale:
Miruna Coca-Cozma/vajo
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