You're listening to the CyberWire's research Saturday.

I'm Dave Bitner and this is our weekly conversation with researchers and analysts tracking down the threats

and vulnerabilities, solving some of the hard problems and protecting ourselves in a rapidly

evolving cyberspace.

Thanks for joining us.

Yeah, so this is a yearly report that we do, basically looking at what are the indicators that we can derive from our reporting, our research, our data, and what kind of conclusions can we draw between that and maybe some

ransomware trends that we might be seeing in the broader community and then sort of

larger look at the longitudinal nature of ransomware events over time and you know what are

though what are we seeing increases are we seeing changes to actor TTPs, etc.

That's Trevor Hillegas, Vice President of SpyCloud Labs.

Today we're discussing their newly released

2024 malware and ransomware defense report. So the story here is Ransomware and before we dig into some of the details I mean can we start with some sort of a broad description? I mean if in your mind where do we find ourselves when it comes to this

ransomware threat? Well we find ourselves in the same kind of place that we have

been maybe maybe a little bit worse there are some

some trends that we don't love to see. Ransomware payments becoming a little bit more common

this year over last year.

You know, there are certainly some positives though.

We've seen some fantastic law enforcement actions on the part of the National

Crime Agency in the UK, the Federal Bureau of Investigation

here in the US and others, seizing the infrastructure, putting out indictments on the

actors that are behind these groups.

So I guess it is kind of a mixed bag,

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