The number of attempted ransomware attacks on Microsoft customers globally have grown dramatically in the last year, according to Microsoft’s Digital Defense report, released on Oct. 15. However, advancements in automatic attack disruption technologies have led to fewer of these attacks reaching the encryption stage. Microsoft reported 600 million cybercriminal and nation-state attacks occurring daily. While ransomware attempts increased by 2.75 times, successful attacks involving data encryption and ransom demands dropped by three-fold. The inverse proportion of launched ransomware attacks to successful ransomware attacks suggests defenses are working, said Microsoft. Source: Microsoft Defender for Endpoint Significant attack types include deepfakes, e-commerce theft Microsoft says it “tracks more than 1,500 unique threat groups — including more than 600 nation-state threat actor groups, 300 cybercrime groups, 200 influence operations groups, and hundreds of others.” The top five ransomware families — Akira, Lockbit, Play, Blackcat, and Basta — accounted for 51% of documented attacks. According to the report, attackers most often exploit social engineering, identity compromises, and vulnerabilities in public-facing applications or unpatched operating systems. Once inside, they …