Sophos’ latest global survey, The State of Ransomware 2021, reveals that 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. The average ransom paid is $170,404. The global findings also show that only 8% of organisations managed to get back all of their data after paying a ransom, with 29% getting back no more than half of their data.
The survey polled 5,400 IT decision makers in mid-sized organisations in 30 countries across Europe, the Americas, Asia-Pacific and Central Asia, the Middle East, and Africa.
While the number of organisations that experienced a ransomware attack fell from 51% of respondents surveyed in 2020 to 37% in 2021, in the UAE, 38% of respondents mentioned a ransomware attack in the last one year, down from 49% in 2020. Globally, fewer organisations suffered data encryption as the result of a significant attack (54% in 2021 compared to 73% in 2020), while in the UAE it dropped to 50%, down from 78% in 2020. The new survey results reveal worrying upward trends, particularly in terms of the impact of a ransomware attack.
“The apparent decline in the number of organisations 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.
According to Wisniewski, attackers have moved from larger scale, generic, automated attacks to more targeted attacks that include human hands-on-keyboard hacking.
“While the overall number of attacks is lower as a result, our experience shows that the potential for damage from these more advanced and complex targeted attacks is much higher. Such attacks are also harder to recover from, and we see this reflected in the survey in the doubling of overall remediation costs.”
The main findings of the State of Ransomware 2021 global survey include:
- The average cost of remediating a ransomware attack more than doubled in the last 12 months. Globally, 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. In the UAE, the average cost of remediating a ransomware attack $517,961 in 2021, compared to $696,305 in 2020
- Globally, the number of organisations that paid the ransom increased from 26% in 2020 to 32% in 2021, although fewer than one in 10 (8%) managed to get back all of their data. In the Middle East, 28% of the organisations hit by ransomware paid a ransom.
“The findings confirm the brutal truth that when it comes to ransomware, it doesn’t pay to pay. Despite more organisations opting to pay a ransom, only a tiny minority of those who paid got back all their data,” said Wisniewski. “This could be in part because using decryption keys to recover information can be complicated. What’s more, there’s 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.”
- More than half (54%) of respondents believe cyberattacks are now too advanced for their IT team to handle on their own
- Extortion without encryption is on the rise. A small, but important 7% said that their data was not encrypted, but they were held to ransom anyway, possibly because the attackers had managed to steal their information. In 2020, this figure was 3%
He added, “It is more important than ever to protect against adversaries at the door, before they get a chance to take hold and unfold their increasingly multi-faceted attacks. Fortunately, if organisations are attacked, they don’t have to face this challenge alone. Support is available 24/7 in the form of external security operations centers, human-led threat hunting and incident response services.”
