Proceeds from extortion attacks, according to blockchain analysts from Chainalysis fell from $765.6 million in 2021 to $456.8 million in 2022. Experts attribute this more than 40% drop to many factors, but the main reason is simple: More and more victims are refusing to pay hackers.

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The researchers note that they may not know all the wallets used by the cybercriminals, but that the payments clearly fell a lot compared to the peak during the COVID-19 outbreak. These findings were confirmed by researchers from Coveware, which helps organizations respond to ransomware attacks. According to their data, Percentage of companies paying ransom fell to 41% in 2022. For comparison, in 2021 50 percent of victims paid, in 2020 – 70 percent of those who were hacked.

Coveware researchers attribute the decline in criminal income to companies investing in security and incident response planning, improvements in law enforcement that hand victims their money and arrest criminals, and the overall effect of less pay that drives extortionists out of the market.

With declining analytics revenues Observe an increase in the amounts that hackers are requesting from victims. They increase every quarter. The companies that become targets are also growing in scale – the bigger the company, the more money they can charge from it.