The average global cost of addressing the impact of a ransomware attack, including business downtime, lost orders, operational costs, and more, but not including the ransom, was US$730,000, said Sophos recently.
This average cost rose to US$1.4 million – almost twice as much – when organisations paid the ransom, the IT security company noted.
These findings are based on a Sophos-commissioned research of 5,000 IT managers on their experiences of ransomeware conducted by Vanson Bourne, according to Sophos which added that it had no role in the selection of respondents and all responses were provided anonymously.
The survey was conducted during January and February 2020 and respondents came from 26 countries across six continents, Sophos added.
“Organisations may feel intense pressure to pay the ransom to avoid damaging downtime. On the face of it, paying the ransom appears to be an effective way of getting data restored, but this is illusory,” said Chester Wisniewski, Principal Research Scientist at Sophos. “Our findings show that paying the ransom makes little difference to the recovery burden in terms of time and cost. This could be because it is unlikely that a single magical decryption key is all that’s needed to recover. Often, the attackers may share several keys and using them to restore data may be a complex and time-consuming affair.”
Survey highlights
- 40% of organisations in Singapore had experienced a ransomware attack in the previous 12 months.
- Data was encrypted in 63% of attacks that successfully breached an organisation.
- 28% of organisations hit by ransomware in Singapore admitted getting their data back by paying the ransom, while 54% managed to recover their data without paying the ransom
- A small minority of 2% were unable to retrieve their data despite paying the ransom
