In fact, despite these numbers, anecdotal evidence, plus the fact that ransomware revenue in the first half of 2021 exceeded that of the first half of 2020, suggests to us that 2021 will eventually be revealed to have been an even bigger year for ransomware. However, just like last year, we know that this too is an underestimate, and that the true total for 2021 is likely to be much higher. You’ll also see above that as of now, we’ve identified just over $602 million worth of ransomware payments in 2021. As of January 2022, we’ve now identified just over $692 million in 2020 ransomware payments - nearly double the amount we initially identified at the time of writing last year’s report. Sure enough, we updated our ransomware numbers a few times throughout 2021, reflecting new payments we hadn’t identified previously.

However, we explained at the time that this figure was likely an underestimate we would raise in the future due to both underreporting by ransomware victims and our continuing identification of ransomware addresses that have received previous victim payments. When we first released that report last year, we announced that we had tracked roughly $350 million worth of payments from victims to ransomware operators. In our last Crypto Crime Report, we deemed 2020 the “Year of Ransomware” due to the huge growth in cryptocurrency extorted in ransomware attacks. This blog is a preview of our 2022 Crypto Crime Report.

Average corporate crypto locker