Ransomware is spreading in Japan

Ransomware is one of the topics in modern cyber crimes. If a computer is infected, important data are encrypted against the will of users. The criminal demands ransom to allow the victims to get the data recovered.

Many people are potentially targeted of ransomware. Not only major companies but also individuals and other organization than profiting companies should be aware of the risk of ransomware. Recently, the data of patients in a hospital were subjected to ransom.

My past entry: Ransom-ware and Bitcoin in hospital

In Japan, increasing cases of ransomware are reported. A total of 2,810 cases, as over four times as that in the previous year, were reported the last year.

Japan Today: Japan becoming prime target of 'ransomware' crime

The other days, Japanese were rarely targeted to cyber crimes because it is hard for the attackers to master the Japanese language. Most phishing mails in Japanese contain some grammatical errors, in my experience. So, it is relatively easy to distinguish deceiving documents in Japanese.

However, recent emails with malice are often written in perfect Japanese. In addition, many companies are needed to treat English emails. It is not so easy for Japanese to distinguish important emails in English from junk ones.

According to the article above, Japanese tend to pay ransom to the attacker. It is obviously a fool idea. In addition to feeding cyber criminals, paying the ransom to an attacker will be a message that the company is willing to surrender. It is highly likely that such information will be sent to other criminals because the dark web society is quite narrow. Thus, making a payment weakens the organization's resistance to the next cyber attack.