Paying Ransom 'No Guarantee' of Getting Data Back
“Gaps in readiness” are seriously hampering the ability of many organizations to “manage and recover” from ransomware attacks, a Zerto study found. “The research also underlines the increased risk to mitigation strategies presented by widespread skills shortages and over-reliance on…
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Communications Daily is required reading for senior executives at top telecom corporations, law firms, lobbying organizations, associations and government agencies (including the FCC). Join them today!
internal resources,” said the Hewlett Packard Enterprise subsidiary Tuesday. In an ESG survey of 620 “qualified respondents” in North America and Western Europe in December, 73% of respondents said their organizations were victimized in the previous 12 months. It said 61% of respondents whose organizations paid a ransom were then subjected to further extortion attempts. Paying a ransom is “no guarantee to getting a business completely back online,” the survey found. Only 14% of respondents said their organizations got 100% of their data back “even after acceding to a ransom demand,” said Zerto. Nearly half of survey respondents (45%) “are struggling with skills issues that will help them respond to a ransomware attack,” it said. Meanwhile, analysts at Skybox Research Lab uncovered a 42% increase in new ransomware programs targeting known vulnerabilities in 2021, compared with 2020, reported the cybersecurity company Tuesday. It unearthed 20,175 new vulnerabilities in 2021, the most ever reported in a single year, it said: “These new vulnerabilities are just the tip of the iceberg. The total number of vulnerabilities published over the last 10 years reached 166,938 in 2021 -- a three-fold increase over a decade.”