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I’m not a fan of putting cybersecurity threats into some kind of competitive listing. All threats need to be taken seriously, and the risk from any one will be different for different companies. That said, if I did make a top three for business, then ransomware would certainly be on it.
The UK Government is taking ransomware seriously enough to be introducing a ban on ransom payments for certain governmental, public sector and critical infrastructure organisations. Whether that will have a positive or negative impact is very much open for debate. What isn’t, however, are the facts about ransomware itself, as laid bare by a new analysis published today by Semperis.
The analysis, which involves research from 1,500 organisations, determined that 78% of surveyed organisations had been targeted by ransomware. 69% of those who had fallen victim to a ransomware attack went on to pay the ransom.
An even more worrying number? The amount of victims that went on to pay multiple ransom demands: a staggering 38%. That’s multiple ransoms within a 12-month period, so lessons are definitely not being learned here.
The UK, it turns out, is at the top of a list it doesn’t want to be at: 84% of organisations are targeted here, more than anywhere else. And half of those attacks are successful, according to the research.
Another new analysis, published by Zscaler ThreatLabz earlier this week, points in the direction that some of this basic protection needs to be.
“Ransomware tactics continue to evolve, with the growing shift toward extortion over encryption as a clear example,” said Deepen Desai, an Executive Vice President at Zscaler. Want figures to back that up? Desai added there has been “a 92% increase in the total volume of exfiltrated data by 10 major ransomware groups in the past year”.
“Paying ransoms should never be the default option,” said Mickey Bresman, CEO of Semperis. “While some circumstances might leave the company in a non-choice situation, we should acknowledge that it’s a down payment on the next attack.”
Bresman is not wrong, but the “non-choice situation” is the crucial part of that quote.
Evaluating the security of the supply chain can help negate this, as often attacks start downwind. But organisations need to make sure they’re getting the cybersecurity basics not only correct but tested and updated as the threat evolves.
The inescapable conclusion is that what is driving ransomware is data, and protecting that data must be paramount if the waves of attacks are to cease flowing.
“Whilst generally good practice in any business,” advised Hiscox, the cyber-insurance specialist, “minimising access to your data to the fewest people possible makes it much harder for a hacker to access a wide spectrum of data for exfiltration from a single account.”
