More People Paid Ransom in 2020 and hackers have increasingly gravitated to more ransomware attacks in 2020. Hackers found ransomware one of the best and most reliable paths to a payday.
What percentage of victims are willing to pay the ransom, and what is that number as of right now?
Crowdstrike recently took a deep dive into the best available data to find out. They discovered that slightly more than one in four (27 percent) of companies that fall victim to a ransomware attack wind up paid for the ransomware rather than restoring from backup. The average ransom demanded is now slightly higher than $1 million.
Given the steady rise in popularity of this type of ransomware attack and how easy it is to avoid paying the ransom, one might wonder why such a high percentage of business owners paid ransomware.
There are two parts to the explanation.
First, although it does seem that on the surface of things, it’s easy to set the conditions that would make it easy to recover from such an attack (have regular backups). However, that’s easy to say. Few companies back up their entire network from end to end, so even if they’ve got current backups, there’s going to lose data, and it’s going to take quite some time to restore full functionality, figure out what’s missing, try and recreate that data, etc.
The other issue is that a company’s backup plan isn’t as robust or as complete as they imagine it was in a surprising number of cases. We’ve seen instances where the company’s CEO thought they were doing backups every week, only to discover that the last good backup available was from six months before.
When you suffer from a ransomware attack and then find out your last backup is six months old, you don’t have any other moves to make. You pay up and hope the hackers deliver on their promise to unlock your files.
Given the prevalence of ransomware attacks, if you’re not preparing for one, you should be. When was your company’s last backup? How sure about that are you?
