It’s been confirmed the Red Cross cyber attack was the work of nation-state actors. SonicWall’s latest report, released today, confirms this is not a standalone development, revealing a +1885% and +755% of ransomware attacks on the global government and healthcare sectors respectively.

Bill Conner, CEO and President at SonicWall, made the following comment:

“Cyber attacks like WannaCry and Not-Petya demonstrate governments can and will, use nefarious means to target critical national infrastructure of nation states. That said, it is not just national infrastructure at risk. For many state-sponsored hackers, business and governmental department disruption is top of the agenda, much like the Red Cross attack.

As the cyber-arms race continues to escalate, there is increasing pressure on the US and UK governments to truly understand the nature of malware cocktails – the process of mixing threats to concoct brand new, destructive attacks. The risks to businesses and even everyday citizens’ data grow each day. Governments and businesses need to deploy a layered security approach utilizing next generation firewalls, deep packet inspection for encrypted communication, cloud-based multi-engine cloud sandboxing, advanced real-time deep memory inspection, and next generation end-point security with rollback capability.”

You can find the full report here.