The rate of ransomware attacks has increased in India with 73 per cent of organisations surveyed reporting they were a victim of ransomware, up from 57 per cent the previous year, a new report has said.
“In 77 per cent of ransomware attacks against surveyed organisations, adversaries succeeded in encrypting data with 44 per cent paying the ransom to get their data back – a considerable drop from last year’s rate of 78 per cent,” cybersecurity company Sophos said in its annual “State of Ransomware 2023” report.
On a global scale, the survey also showed that when organisations paid a ransom to get their data decrypted, they ended up additionally doubling their recovery costs (US$750,000 in recovery costs versus US$375,000 for organisations that used backups to get data back).
“Although dipping slightly from the previous year, the rate of encryption remains high at 77 per cent, which is certainly concerning. Ransomware crews have been refining their methodologies of attack and accelerating their attacks to reduce the time for defenders to disrupt their schemes,” said Chester Wisniewski, field CTO, Sophos.
When analysing the root cause of ransomware attacks, the most common was an exploited vulnerability (involved in 35 per cent of cases), followed by compromised credentials (involved in 33 per cent of cases).