RETALIATION FIRST: RESPONDING TO RANSOMWARE
Cyber crime pervades the corporate world like a plague. It is constantly evolving in complexity and dynamics to penetrate and compromise companies of all sizes.
Of all the iterations of cyber crime, it is ransomware, a type of malware, that is the fastest growing and most sophisticated mode of attack. It is also the most costly. According to IBM’s ‘Cost of a Data Breach’ report, the average cost of a ransomware breach to a company is $5.13m, a sum that does not include ransom payments.
In its analysis of the cyber crime environment, Cybersecurity Ventures estimates that ransomware will cost its victims $265bn annually by 2031, up from $42bn in 2024 and $20bn in 2021. It also predicts that new attacks on companies will occur every two seconds as ransomware perpetrators progressively refine their activities.
“Ransomware attacks have risen by over 13 percent in the last five years with no signs of slowing down,” concurs Heather Engel, managing partner at Strategic Cyber Partners. “The attack vectors and methods we see have gotten more sophisticated and destructive, with the goal of making it harder to recover, forcing companies to have to consider paying a ransom.”
Needless to say, perpetrators of cyber attacks, whether ransomware-orientated or not, are people with little empathy for others – as evidenced by numerous analyses that show hospitals, as a pertinent example, are just as likely to be the target of an attack as a multinational corporation.
Types of ransomware
As outlined by IBM, there are two general types of ransomware. The most common type, called encrypting ransomware or crypto ransomware, holds a company’s data hostage by encrypting it. The attacker then demands a ransom in exchange for providing the encryption key needed to decrypt the data.
Oct-Dec 2024 Issue
Fraser Tennant