93 percent of phishing emails are ransomware – study

The number of phishing emails hit 6.3 million in the first quarter of 2016, a 789% increase over the last quarter of 2015.

Ransomware accounted for 51% of all variants in March, up from just 29% in February and 15% in January. The growth is due to that fact that ransomware is getting easier to send and that it offers a quick and easy return on investment.

Other types of cyberattacks typically take more work to monetize. Stolen credit card numbers have to be sold and used before the cards are canceled, for example. Identity theft takes even more of a time commitment.

With ransomware, however, victims tend to pay quickly. Instead of hunting through company networks for valuable data, exfiltrating it, processing it, and monetizing it, ransomware criminals can just sit back and watch the money flow in.

As regards the two common varieties of ransomware, in October and November of 2015, CryptoWall accounted for 90% of encryption ransomware samples. In March, nearly 75% of all samples were Locky.