By Mathew J. Schwartz
When startups grow bigger, they inevitably hire more employees to handle increasingly specialized tasks. The same goes with nascent, illegitimate enterprises, such as ransomware gangs, including Maze and the Sodinokibi – aka REvil – ransomware-as-a-service operation, which have been looking to conduct more sophisticated attacks to help them take down larger targets and demand higher ransoms.
“When they get larger, the one or two people that have a certain specialization can’t wear every single hat,” says CEO of ransomware incident response firm Coveware, Bill Siegel. “So they bring in people with different specializations: people that specialize in the exfiltration of data, people that specialize in the cloud storage and moving around large volumes of stolen data, people that specialize in the negotiations and people who specialize in encryption and decryption. It turns into a big organization.”
