India’s second-largest hydrocarbon explorer suffered a ransomware attack that hit one of the workstations of the Geological and Reservoir department on April 10. Hackers infected the company’s network with malware that encrypted the data and left a note demanding 196 BTC (almost $8m at the time of writing) for the encryption key. However, Oil India refused to pay the ransom. Instead, the company disabled the affected part of the network as a precautionary measure, according to the Oil India spokesperson Tridip Hazarika.
According to the Chainalysis 2022 Crypto Crime Report, the average ransomware payment size was over $118,000 in 2021, compared to $88,000 in 2020. The reason behind the increase is that hackers started focusing on highly-targeted attacks against large organizations.
