Our new 2017 Ransomware Report shows that companies and government agencies are overwhelmed by frequent, severe ransomware attacks, which have now become the #1 cyber threat to organizations.
This new ransomware study is based on a comprehensive online survey of over 500 cybersecurity professionals, providing insight into the latest ransomware trends and valuable guidance on addressing the evolving ransomware threat.
“In many respects, ransomware is a game changer. It is incredibly easy and inexpensive for cybercriminals to execute highly profitable attacks on a global scale,” said Holger Schulze, CEO and Founder of Cybersecurity Insiders. “Many organizations are alarmingly unprepared for the ransomware onslaught.”
Report highlights include:
- Ransomware is the fastest growing security threat, perceived as a moderate or extreme threat by 80% of cybersecurity professionals. 75% of organizations affected by ransomware experienced up to five attacks in the last 12 months alone, 25% experienced 6 or more attacks. Only a small fraction of respondents say they would pay the ransom or negotiate with the attackers.
- Email and web use represent the most common ransomware infection vectors with employees opening malicious email attachments (73%), responding to a phishing email (54%) or visiting a compromised website (28%). From a solution perspective, the majority of identified ransomware attacks were detected through endpoint security tools (83%), email and web gateways (64%), and intrusion detection systems (46%).
- Security professionals rank user awareness training the most effective tactic to prevent and block ransomware (77%) followed by with endpoint security solutions (73%), and patching of operating systems (72%) as preventive approaches to ransomware threats. 51% are only slightly to moderately confident of their organization’s ransomware defense.
- A majority of 54% say they could recover from a successful ransomware attack within a day, while 39% estimate it will take more than one day to a few weeks to recover. Speed of recovery is absolutely mission-critical as business cost escalates with every hour the business cannot fully operate.
The 2017 Ransomware Report was produced in partnership with leading cybersecurity vendors: AlienVault, Barkly, Bitdefender, Cybereason, D3 Security, Evident.io, Forcepoint, IRONSCALES, Securonix, SentinelOne, TEHTRIS, Tenable, Vectra, and Veriato.
Download the full report here.
