Kaspersky has been following the ransomware landscape for years. In the past, we’ve published yearly reports on the subject: PC ransomware in 2014-2016, Ransomware in 2016-2017, and Ransomware and malicious crypto miners in 2016-2018. In fact, in 2019, we chose ransomware as the story of the year, upon noticing the well-known threat was shifting its attention to municipalities. In the 2010s, with campaigns like WannaCry and NotPetya, ransomware became mainstream news. However, starting in 2018, we began noticing something else: the statistics for the overall number of ransomware detections were on a steep decline. What was happening? Was ransomware, in fact, a dying species of malware?
