The average total cost of recovery from a ransomware attack has more than doubled in a year, increasing from $761,106 in 2020 to $1.85 million in 2021.
This is part of the findings in the latest State of Ransomware 2021 survey by Sophos, a next-generation cybersecurity organisation.
Ransomware gangs collected almost $350 million last year, up threefold from 2019, according to another report. Companies, government agencies, hospitals and school systems are among the victims of ransomware groups, some of which US officials say have friendly relations with nation-states including North Korea and Russia.
The Sophos survey polled 5,400 information technology decision makers in mid-sized organizations in 30 countries across Europe, the Americas, Asia-Pacific and Central Asia, the Middle East, and Africa.
The average ransom a business paid is $170,404. The global findings also show that only 8 percent of organizations managed to get back all of their data after paying a ransom, with 29 percent getting back no more than half of their data.
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While the number of organizations that experienced a ransomware attack fell from 51 percent of respondents surveyed in 2020 to 37 percent in 2021, and fewer organizations suffered data encryption as the result of a significant attack (54 percent in 2021 compared to 73 percent in 2020), the new survey results show worrying upward trends, particularly in terms of the impact of a ransomware attack.
“The apparent decline in the number of organizations being hit by ransomware is good news, but it is tempered by the fact that this is likely to reflect, at least in part, changes in attacker behaviors,” said Chester Wisniewski, principal research scientist, Sophos.
Wisniewski said attackers have moved from larger scale, generic, automated attacks to more targeted attacks that include human hands-on-keyboard hacking.
The overall number of attacks is lower. However, the potential for damage from these more advanced and complex targeted attacks is much higher. Such attacks are also harder to recover from, and this is reflected in the survey in the doubling of overall remediation costs.
In general, the survey found that the average cost of remediating a ransomware attack more than doubled in the last 12 months. Remediation costs, including business downtime, lost orders, operational costs, and more, grew from an average of $761,106 in 2020 to $1.85 million in 2021. This means that the average cost of recovering from a ransomware attack is now 10 times the size of the ransom payment, on average.
Also the average ransom paid was $170,404. While $3.2 million was the highest payment out of those surveyed, the most common payment was $10,000. Ten organizations paid ransoms of $1 million or more.
Some 22 percent of respondents from Nigeria had experienced a ransomware attack in the last 12 months, compared to 53 percent in 2020.
At the same time, 39 percent of respondents from Nigeria that weren’t hit by ransomware in the last 12 months but expect to be hit in the future believe that ransomware attacks are getting increasingly hard to stop due to their sophistication.
The survey also found that the number of organizations that paid the ransom increased from 26 percent in 2020 to 32 percent in 2021, although fewer than one in 10 (8 percent) managed to get back all of their data.
“The findings confirm the brutal truth that when it comes to ransomware, it doesn’t pay to pay. Despite more organizations opting to pay a ransom, only a tiny minority of those who paid got back all their data,” said Wisniewski.
He said this is partly because using decryption keys to recover information can be complicated. Also, there is no guarantee of success.
“For instance, as we saw recently with DearCry and Black Kingdom ransomware, attacks launched with low quality or hastily compiled code and techniques can make data recovery difficult, if not impossible,” he said.
Sophos outlines six best practices to help defend against ransomware and related cyberattacks.
According to Sophos, first, businesses should assume they will be targeted and possibly hit. Ransomware remains highly prevalent. No sector, country or organization size is immune from the risk. It’s better to be prepared, but not hit, rather than the other way round.
It is important to make backups and keep a copy offline. Backups are the main method organizations surveyed used to recover their data after an attack. Opt for the industry standard approach of 3:2:1 (three sets of backups, using two different media, one of which is kept offline).
There is a need to deploy layered protection. As more ransomware attacks also involve extortion, it is more important than ever to keep adversaries out in the first place. Use layered protection to block attackers at as many points as possible across an estate
Another recommendation is to combine human experts and anti-ransomware technology. The key to stopping ransomware is defence in depth that combines dedicated anti-ransomware technology and human-led threat hunting. Technology provides the scale and automation an organization needs, while human experts are best able to detect the tell-tale tactics, techniques and procedures that indicate an attacker is attempting to get into the environment. If you don’t have the skills in-house, look at enlisting the support of a specialist cybersecurity company – Security Operation Centers (SOCs) are now realistic options for organizations of all sizes
Don’t pay the ransom. Easy to say, but far less easy to do when an organization has ground to a halt due to a ransomware attack. Independent of any ethical considerations, paying the ransom is an ineffective way to get data back. If you do decide to pay, bear in mind that the adversaries will restore, on average, only two-thirds of your files
Have a malware recovery plan. The best way to stop a cyberattack from turning into a full breach is to prepare in advance. Organizations that fall victim to an attack often realize they could have avoided significant financial loss and disruption, if they had an incident response plan in place, Sophos said.
