Have you been a victim of a ransomware attack? Then think twice before paying to the hackers or ransomware authors, as a recent study says that only half of the ransomware payments are honored.
CyberEdge Group which carried out a research on 1200 corporate respondents has confirmed that only half of the ransomware victims were able to successfully recover data after paying them a ransom in cryptocurrency, while others acknowledged the process as complete data loss.
The research says that only 55% of respondents were victimized by ransomware in 2017. And of those victims, 21% refused to pay a ransom, while a vast majority of them bowed to the demands of the ransomware spreaders. However, from the said percentage, only half or even less of them could recover their data from backups.
Therefore, there is enough evidence that most of the ransomware payments are not obliged by hackers and so companies need to stop paying to the hackers and start depending on business continuity plans such as data recovery from backups.
Another best way to prevent an attack from deteriorating further is to immediately detect a ransomware file access behavior before the ransomware spreads across the network and encrypts file servers. This can be done by using cyber threat monitoring tools provided by companies like Alienvault.
CyberEdge Group research has also confirmed that security budgets have set a new record in 2017, as a large proportion of firms chose to raise their IT security budgets from just 48% in 2014 to 79% in 2018. But the researchers are not sure yet on the amount of budget which is being spent by CTOs and CIOs on the security tools in a meaningful way.
The 2018 Cyberthreat Defense Report of CyberEdge Group is treated as one of the few reliable independent surveys compiled by industry’s vastly experienced security practitioners. Its findings and conclusions are often treated as unbiased and the analysis helps as a guiding resource for all cyber security enthusiasts.
