For much of the past year, the trail of destruction and mayhem left behind by ransomware hackers was on full display. Digital extortion gangs paralyzed hundreds of US pharmacies and clinics through their attack on Change Healthcare, exploited security vulnerabilities in the customer accounts of cloud provider Snowflake to breach a string of high-profile targets, and extracted a record $75 million from a single victim.
Yet beneath those headlines, the numbers tell a surprising story: Ransomware payments actually fell overall in 2024—and in the second half of the year dropped more precipitously than in any six-month period on record.
Cryptocurrency tracing firm Chainalysis today released a portion of its annual crime report focused on tracking the ransomware industry, which found that ransomware victims’ extortion payments totaled $814 million in 2024, a drop of 35 percent compared to the record $1.25 billion that hackers extracted from ransomware victims the previous year. Breaking down the payments over the course of 2024 shows an even more positive trend: Hackers collected just $321 million from July through December compared to $492 million the previous half year, the biggest falloff in payments between two six-month periods that Chainalysis has ever seen.
