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Only 38% of businesses believe they will recover from a ransomware attack

Graham CLULEY

March 28, 2016

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Only 38% of businesses believe they will recover from a ransomware attack

There is no denying it – ransomware has become a significant threat for many companies and computer users.

Millions of dollars are being made each and every month by the online criminals launching ransomware attacks, bombarding users via poisoned email attachments and malicious website ads.

And Bitdefender’s predictions that ransomware would spread to operating systems other than Windows and Android in 2016, appear to becoming true.

Now a new study by security firm Tripwire suggests that a worrying small number of companies believe that they will be able to totally recover from a ransomware infection.

The company asked 200 security professionals attending the RSA 2016 conference in San Francisco about how confident they would feel that they could recover after losing critical data following a ransomware infection.

ransomware-study

Only 38% of businesses questioned said that they were “very confident” that they could fully recover after such an attack. 49% related that they would be “somewhat confident”, and a worrying 13% admitted that they were not confident at all that recovery would be possible.

With the current spate of ransomware attacks, that’s a frightening statistic. And it suggests that many companies are not following the best practice steps required to reduce the chances of infection, and increase the likelihood of successful recovery if ransomware does manage to attack their systems.

The implication of this study is that more businesses and organisations might find themselves making the hard-to-swallow decision to actually pay the extortionists who infected their systems and encrypted their data, rather than simply recover lost data from a secure backup.

I’m sure nobody likes the idea of online criminals making millions out of ransomware attacks, extorting huge amounts of money out of poorly-prepared individuals and companies. If you don’t want your company to be the next ransomware casualty find out the simple ways to reduce the threat and make it your mission today to start doing secure, easy-to-restore, backups of your company critical data.

Because the advice of “just pay the ransom” leaves all of us who use the internet at greater risk of future attacks.

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Graham CLULEY

Graham Cluley is an award-winning security blogger, researcher and public speaker. He has been working in the computer security industry since the early 1990s.

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