Beyond the Game: Policy Priorities for Responsible Esports Betting

Disclaimer:

This report is based on extensive research conducted by CyberPeace Research using publicly available information, and advanced analytical techniques. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions presented are based on the data available at the time of study and aim to provide insights into global ransomware trends.

The statistics mentioned in this report are specific to the scope of this research and may vary based on the scope and resources of other third-party studies. Additionally, all data referenced is based on claims made by threat actors and does not imply confirmation of the breach by CyberPeace. CyberPeace includes this detail solely to provide factual transparency and does not condone any unlawful activities. This information is shared only for research purposes and to spread awareness. CyberPeace encourages individuals and organizations to adopt proactive cybersecurity measures to protect against potential threats.

CyberPeace Research does not claim to have identified or attributed specific cyber incidents to any individual, organization, or nation-state beyond the scope of publicly observable activities and available information. All analyses and references are intended for informational and awareness purposes only, without any intention to defame, accuse, or harm any entity.

While every effort has been made to ensure accuracy, CyberPeace Research is not liable for any errors, omissions, subsequent interpretations and any unlawful activities of the findings by third parties. The report is intended to inform and support cybersecurity efforts globally and should be used as a guide to foster proactive measures against cyber threats.

Executive Summary: 

The 2024 ransomware landscape reveals alarming global trends, with 166 Threat Actor Groups leveraging 658 servers/underground resources and mirrors to execute 5,233 claims across 153 countries. Monthly fluctuations in activity indicate strategic, cyclical targeting, with peak periods aligned with vulnerabilities in specific sectors and regions. The United States was the most targeted nation, followed by Canada, the UK, Germany, and other developed countries, with the northwestern hemisphere experiencing the highest concentration of attacks. Business Services and Healthcare bore the brunt of these operations due to their high-value data, alongside targeted industries such as Pharmaceuticals, Mechanical, Metal, Electronics, and Government-related professional firms. Retail, Financial, Technology, and Energy sectors were also significantly impacted.

This research was conducted by CyberPeace Research using a systematic modus operandi, which included advanced OSINT (Open-Source Intelligence) techniques, continuous monitoring of Ransomware Group activities, and data collection from 658 servers and mirrors globally. The team utilized data scraping, pattern analysis, and incident mapping to track trends and identify hotspots of ransomware activity. By integrating real-time data and geographic claims, the research provided a comprehensive view of sectoral and regional impacts, forming the basis for actionable insights.

The findings emphasize the urgent need for proactive Cybersecurity strategies, robust defenses, and global collaboration to counteract the evolving and persistent threats posed by ransomware.

Overview:

This report provides insights into ransomware activities monitored throughout 2024. Data was collected by observing 166 Threat Actor Groups using ransomware technologies across 658 servers/underground resources and mirrors, resulting in 5,233 claims worldwide. The analysis offers a detailed examination of global trends, targeted sectors, and geographical impact.

Top 10 Threat Actor Groups:

The ransomware group ‘ransomhub’ has emerged as the leading threat actor, responsible for 527 incidents worldwide. Following closely are ‘lockbit3’ with 522 incidents and ‘play’ with 351. Other Groups are ‘akira’, ‘hunters’, ‘medusa’, ‘blackbasta’, ‘qilin’, ‘bianlian’, ‘incransom’. These groups usually employ advanced tactics to target critical sectors, highlighting the urgent need for robust cybersecurity measures to mitigate their impact and protect organizations from such threats.

Monthly Ransomware Incidents:

In January 2024, the value began at 284, marking the lowest point on the chart. The trend rose steadily in the subsequent months, reaching its first peak at 557 in May 2024. However, after this peak, the value dropped sharply to 339 in June. A gradual recovery follows, with the value increasing to 446 by August. September sees another decline to 389, but a sharp rise occurs afterward, culminating in the year’s highest point of 645 in November. The year concludes with a slight decline, ending at 498 in December 2024 (till 28th of December).

Top 10 Targeted Countries:

1. The United States consistently topped the list as the primary target probably due to its advanced economic and technological infrastructure.
2. Other heavily targeted nations include Canada, UK, Germany, Italy, France, Brazil, Spain, and India.
3. A total of 153 countries reported ransomware attacks, reflecting the global scale of these cyber threats

Top Affected Sectors:

1. Business Services and Healthcare faced the brunt of ransomware threat due to the sensitive nature of their operations.
2. Specific industries under threats:
   1. Pharmaceutical, Mechanical, Metal, and Electronics industries.
   2. Professional firms within the Government sector.
3. Other sectors:
   1. Retail, Financial, Technology, and Energy sectors were also significant targets.

Geographical Impact:

The continuous and precise OSINT(Open Source Intelligence) work on the platform, performed as a follow-up action to data scraping, allows a complete view of the geography of cyber attacks based on their claims. The northwestern region of the world appears to be the most severely affected by Threat Actor groups. The figure below clearly illustrates the effects of this geographic representation on the map.

Ransomware Threat Trends in India:

In 2024, the research identified 98 ransomware incidents impacting various sectors in India, marking a 55% increase compared to the 63 incidents reported in 2023. This surge highlights a concerning trend, as ransomware groups continue to target India's critical sectors due to its growing digital infrastructure and economic prominence.

Top Threat Actors Group Targeted India:

Among the following threat actors ‘killsec’ is the most frequent threat. ‘lockbit3’  follows as the second most prominent threat, with significant but lower activity than killsec. Other groups, such as ‘ransomhub’, ‘darkvault’, and ‘clop’, show moderate activity levels. Entities like ‘bianlian’, ‘apt73/bashe’, and ‘raworld’ have low frequencies, indicating limited activity. Groups such as ‘aps’ and ‘akira’ have the lowest representation, indicating minimal activity. The chart highlights a clear disparity in activity levels among these threats, emphasizing the need for targeted cybersecurity strategies.

Top Impacted Sectors in India:

The pie chart illustrates the distribution of incidents across various sectors, highlighting that the industrial sector is the most frequently targeted, accounting for 75% of the total incidents. This is followed by the healthcare sector, which represents 12% of the incidents, making it the second most affected. The finance sector accounts for 10% of the incidents, reflecting a moderate level of targeting. In contrast, the government sector experiences the least impact, with only 3% of the incidents, indicating minimal targeting compared to the other sectors. This distribution underscores the critical need for enhanced cybersecurity measures, particularly in the industrial sector, while also addressing vulnerabilities in healthcare, finance, and government domains.

Month Wise Incident Trends in India:

The chart indicates a fluctuating trend with notable peaks in May and October, suggesting potential periods of heightened activity or incidents during these months. The data starts at 5 in January and drops to its lowest point, 2, in February. It then gradually increases to 6 in March and April, followed by a sharp rise to 14 in May. After peaking in May, the metric significantly declines to 4 in June but starts to rise again, reaching 7 in July and 8 in August. September sees a slight dip to 5 before the metric spikes dramatically to its highest value, 24, in October. Following this peak, the count decreases to 10 in November and then drops further to 7 in December.

CyberPeace Advisory:

1. Implement Data Backup and Recovery Plans: Backups are your safety net. Regularly saving copies of your important data ensures you can bounce back quickly if ransomware strikes. Make sure these backups are stored securely—either offline or in a trusted cloud service—to avoid losing valuable information or facing extended downtime.  
2. Enhance Employee Awareness and Training: People often unintentionally open the door to ransomware. By training your team to spot phishing emails, social engineering tricks, and other scams, you empower them to be your first line of defense against attacks.  
3. Adopt Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA): Think of MFA as locking your door and adding a deadbolt. Even if attackers get hold of your password, they’ll still need that second layer of verification to break in. It’s an easy and powerful way to block unauthorized access.  
4. Utilize Advanced Threat Detection Tools: Smart tools can make a world of difference. AI-powered systems and behavior-based monitoring can catch ransomware activity early, giving you a chance to stop it in its tracks before it causes real damage.  
5. Conduct Regular Vulnerability Assessments: You can’t fix what you don’t know is broken. Regularly checking for vulnerabilities in your systems helps you identify weak spots. By addressing these issues proactively, you can stay one step ahead of attackers.

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Conclusion:

The 2024 ransomware landscape reveals the critical need for proactive cybersecurity strategies. High-value sectors and technologically advanced regions remain the primary targets, emphasizing the importance of robust defenses. As we move into 2025, it is crucial to anticipate the evolution of ransomware tactics and adopt forward-looking measures to address emerging threats. 

Global collaboration, continuous innovation in cybersecurity technologies, and adaptive strategies will be imperative to counteract the persistent and evolving threats posed by ransomware activities. Organizations and governments must prioritize preparedness and resilience, ensuring that lessons learned in 2024 are applied to strengthen defenses and minimize vulnerabilities in the year ahead.

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Introduction

The ongoing debate on whether AI scaling has hit a wall has been rehashed by the underwhelming response to OpenAI’s ChatGPT v5. AI scaling laws, which describe that machine learning models perform better with increased training data, model parameters and computational resources, have guided the rapid progress of Large Language Models (LLMs) so far. But many AI researchers suggest that further improvements in LLMs will have to be effected through large computational costs by orders of magnitude, which does not justify the returns.  The question, then, is whether scaling remains a viable path or whether the field must explore new approaches. This is not just a tech issue but a profound innovation challenge for countries like India, charting their own AI course. 

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The Scaling Wall: Gaps and Innovation Opportunities

Escalating costs, data scarcity, and diminishing gains mean that simply building larger AI models may no longer guarantee breakthroughs. In such a scenario, LLM developers will have to refine new approaches to training these models, for example, by diversifying data types and redefining training techniques.  

This global challenge has a bearing on India’s AI ambitions. For India, where compute and data resources are relatively scarce, this scaling slowdown poses both a challenge and an opportunity. While the India AI Mission embodies smart priorities such as democratising compute resources and developing local datasets, looming scaling challenges could prove a roadblock.  Realising these ambitions requires strong input from research and academia, and improved coordination between policymakers and startups. The scaling wall highlights systemic innovation gaps where sustained support is needed, not only in hardware but also in talent development, safety research, and efficient model design.

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Way Forward

To truly harness AI’s transformative power, India must prioritise policy actions and ecosystem shifts that support smarter, safer, and context-rich research through the following measures: 

• Driving Efficiency and Compute Innovation: Instead of relying on brute-force scaling, India should invest in research and startups working on efficient architectures, energy-conscious training methods, and compute optimisation.
• Investing in Multimodal and Diverse Data: While indigenous datasets are being developed under the India AI Mission through AI Kosha, they must be ethically sourced from speech, images, video, sensor data, and regional content, apart from text, to enable context-rich AI models truly tailored to Indian needs. 
• Addressing Core Problems for Trustworthy AI:  LLMs offered by all major companies, like OpenAI, Grok, and Deepseek, have the problem of unreliability, hallucinations, and biases, since they are primarily built on scaling large datasets and parameters, which have inherent limitations. India should invest in capabilities to solve these issues and design more trustworthy LLMs.
• Supporting Talent Development and Training: Despite its substantial AI talent pool, India faces an impending demand-supply gap. It will need to launch national programs and incentives to upskill engineers, researchers, and students in advanced AI skills such as model efficiency, safety, interpretability, and new training paradigms

Conclusion

The AI scaling wall debate is a reminder that the future of LLMs will depend not on ever-larger models but on smarter, safer, and more sustainable innovation. A new generation of AI is approaching us, and India can help shape its future. The country’s AI Mission and startup ecosystem are well-positioned to lead this shift by focusing on localised needs, efficient technologies, and inclusive growth, if implemented effectively. How India approaches this new set of challenges and translates its ambitions into action, however, remains to be seen.

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References

• https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/ai-scaling-laws/
• https://www.marketingaiinstitute.com/blog/scaling-laws-ai-wall 
• https://fortune.com/2025/02/19/generative-ai-scaling-agi-deep-learning/ 
• https://indiaai.gov.in/ 
• https://www.deloitte.com/in/en/about/press-room/bridging-the-ai-talent-gap-to-boost-indias-tech-and-economic-impact-deloitte-nasscom-report.html 

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Executive Summary:

QakBot, a particular kind of banking trojan virus, is capable of stealing personal data, banking passwords, and session data from a user's computer. Since its first discovery in 2009, Qakbot has had substantial modifications.

C2 Server commands infected devices and receives stolen data, which is essentially the brain behind Qakbot's operations.Qakbot employs PEDLL (Communication Files), a malicious program, to interact with the server in order to accomplish its main goals. Sensitive data, including passwords or personal information, is taken from the victims and sent to the C2 server. Referrer files start the main line of communication between Qakbot and the C2 server, such as phishing papers or malware droppers. WHOIS data includes registration details for this server, which helps to identify its ownership or place of origin.

This report specifically focuses on the C2 server infrastructure located in India, shedding light on its architecture, communication patterns, and threat landscape.

Introduction:

QakBot is also known as Pinkslipbot, QuakBot, and QBot, capable of stealing personal data, banking passwords, and session data from a user's computer. Malware is bad since it spreads very quickly to other networks, affecting them like a worm.,It employs contemporary methods like web injection to eavesdrop on customer online banking interactions. Qakbot is a member of a kind of malware that has robust persistence techniques, which are said to be the most advanced in order to gain access to compromised computers for extended periods of time.
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Technical Analysis: 

The following IP addresses have been confirmed as active C2 servers supporting Qbot malware activity:

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Sample IP's

• 123.201.40[.]112
• 117.198.151[.]182
• 103.250.38[.]115
• 49.33.237[.]65
• 202.134.178[.]157
• 124.123.42[.]115
• 115.96.64[.]9
• 123.201.44[.]86
• 117.202.161[.]73
• 136.232.254[.]46

These servers have been operational in the past 14 days (report created in the month of Nov) and are being leveraged to perpetuate malicious activities globally.

URL/IP: 123.201.40[.]112

• inetnum: 123.201.32[.]0 - 123.201.47[.]255
• netname: YOUTELE
• descr: YOU Telecom India Pvt Ltd
• country: IN
• admin-c: HA348-AP
• tech-c: NI23-AP
• status: ASSIGNED NON-PORTABLE 
• mnt-by: MAINT-IN-YOU
• last-modified: 2022-08-16T06:43:19Z
• mnt-irt: IRT-IN-YOU
• source: APNIC
• irt: IRT-IN-YOU
• address: YOU Broadband India Limited
• address: 2nd Floor, Millennium Arcade
• address: Opp. Samarth Park, Adajan-Hazira Road
• address: Surat-395009,Gujarat
• address: India
• e-mail: abuse@youbroadband.co.in
• abuse-mailbox: abuse@youbroadband.co.in 
• admin-c: HA348-AP
• tech-c: NI23-AP
• auth: # Filtered
• mnt-by: MAINT-IN-YOU
• last-modified: 2022-08-08T10:30:51Z
• source: APNIC
• person: Harindra Akbari
• nic-hdl: HA348-AP
• e-mail: harindra.akbari@youbroadband.co.in
• address: YOU Broadband India Limited
• address: 2nd Floor, Millennium Arcade
• address: Opp. Samarth Park, Adajan-Hazira Road
• address: Surat-395009,Gujarat
• address: India
• phone: +91-261-7113400
• fax-no: +91-261-2789501
• country: IN
• mnt-by: MAINT-IN-YOU
• last-modified: 2022-08-10T11:01:47Z
• source: APNIC
• person: NOC IQARA
• nic-hdl: NI23-AP
• e-mail: network@youbroadband.co.in
• address: YOU Broadband India Limited
• address: 2nd Floor, Millennium Arcade
• address: Opp. Samarth Park, Adajan-Hazira Road
• address: Surat-395009,Gujarat
• address: India
• phone: +91-261-7113400
• fax-no: +91-261-2789501
• country: IN
• mnt-by: MAINT-IN-YOU
• last-modified: 2022-08-08T10:18:09Z
• source: APNIC
• route: 123.201.40.0/24
• descr: YOU Broadband & Cable India Ltd.
• origin: AS18207
• mnt-lower: MAINT-IN-YOU
• mnt-routes: MAINT-IN-YOU
• mnt-by: MAINT-IN-YOU
• last-modified: 2012-01-25T11:25:55Z
• source: APNIC

IP 123.201.40[.]112 uses the requested URL-path to make a GET request on the IP-address at port 80. "NOT RESPONDED" is the response status code for the request "C:\PROGRAM FILES GOOGLE CHROME APPLICATION CHROME.EXE" that was started by the process. 

Programs that retrieve their server data using a GET request are considered legitimate. The Google Chrome browser, a fully functional application widely used for web browsing, was used to make the actual request. It asks to get access to the server with IP 123.201.40[.]112 in order to collect its data and other resources. 

Malware uses GET requests to retrieve more commands or to send data back to the command and control servers. In this instance, it may be an attack server making the request to a known IP address with a known port number. Since the server has not replied to the request, the response status "NOT RESPONDED" may indicate that the activity was carried out with malicious intent.

This graph illustrates how the Qakbot virus operates and interacts with its C2 server, located in India and with the IP address 123.201.40[.]112. 

Impact

Qbot is a kind of malware that is typically distributed through hacked websites, malicious email attachments, and phishing operations. It targets private user information, including corporate logins or banking passwords. The deployment of ransomware: Payloads from organizations such as ProLock and Egregor ransomware are delivered by Qbot, a predecessor. Network Vulnerability: Within corporate networks, compromised systems will act as gateways for more lateral movement.

Proposed Recommendations for Mitigation

• Quick Action: To stop any incoming or outgoing traffic, the discovered IP addresses will be added to intrusion detection/prevention systems and firewalls.
• Network monitoring: Examining network log information for any attempts to get in touch with these IPs
• Email security: Give permission for anti-phishing programs.
• Endpoint Protection: To identify and stop Qbot infestations, update antivirus definitions.,Install tools for endpoint detection and response.
• Patch management: To reduce vulnerabilities that Qbot exploits, update all operating systems and software on a regular basis.
• Incident Response: Immediately isolate compromised computers.
• Awareness: Dissemination of this information to block the IP addresses of active C2 servers supporting Qbot malware activity has to be carried out.

Conclusion:

The discovery of these C2 servers reveals the growing danger scenario that Indian networks must contend with. To protect its infrastructure from future abuse, organizations are urged to act quickly and put the aforementioned precautions into place. 

Reference: 

• Threat Intelligence - ANY.RUN
• https://www.virustotal.com/gui
• https://www.virustotal.com/gui/ip-address/123.201.40.112/relations

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