Ransomware recovery cost more than doubles to $ 2 m: Sophos

Sophos, a global leader in next-generation cybersecurity, today announced the findings of its global survey, ‘The State of Ransomware 2021’, which reveals that the average total cost of recovery from a ransomware attack has more than

Chester Wisniewski

doubled in a year, increasing from $ 761,106 in 2020 to $ 1.85 million in 2021. 

The average ransom paid is $ 170,404. The global findings also show that only 8% of organisations managed to get back all of their data after paying a ransom, with 29% getting back no more than half of their data. 

The survey polled 5,400 IT decision makers in mid-sized organisations in 30 countries across Europe, the Americas, Asia-Pacific and Central Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. 

While the number of organisations that experienced a ransomware attack fell from 51% of respondents surveyed in 2020 to 37% in 2021, and fewer organisations suffered data encryption as the result of a significant attack (54% in 2021 compared to 73% in 2020), the new survey results reveal worrying upward trends, particularly in terms of the impact of a ransomware attack.

“The apparent decline in the number of organisations being hit by ransomware is good news, but it is tempered by the fact that this is likely to reflect, at least in part, changes in attacker behaviours,” said Chester Wisniewski, principal research scientist, Sophos. 

“We’ve seen attackers move from larger scale, generic, automated attacks to more targeted attacks that include human hands-on-keyboard hacking. While the overall number of attacks is lower as a result, our experience shows that the potential for damage from these more advanced and complex targeted attacks is much higher. Such attacks are also harder to recover from, and we see this reflected in the survey in the doubling of overall remediation costs.”

The main findings of the State of Ransomware 2021 global survey include:

• The average cost of remediating a ransomware attack more than doubled in the last 12 months. Remediation costs, including business downtime, lost orders, operational costs, and more, grew from an average of $ 761,106 in 2020 to $ 1.85 million in 2021. This means that the average cost of recovering from a ransomware attack is now 10 times the size of the ransom payment, on average
• The average ransom paid was $ 170,404. While $ 3.2 million was the highest payment out of those surveyed, the most common payment was $ 10,000. 10 organisations paid ransoms of $ 1 million or more
• The number of organisations that paid the ransom increased from 26% in 2020 to 32% in 2021, although fewer than one in 10 (8%) managed to get back all of their data

“The findings confirm the brutal truth that when it comes to ransomware, it doesn’t pay to pay. Despite more organisations opting to pay a ransom, only a tiny minority of those who paid got back all their data,” said Wisniewski. 

“This could be in part because using decryption keys to recover information can be complicated. What’s more, there’s no guarantee of success. For instance, as we saw recently with DearCry and Black Kingdom ransomware, attacks launched with low quality or hastily compiled code and techniques can make data recovery difficult, if not impossible.”

More than half (54%) of respondents believe cyberattacks are now too advanced for their IT team to handle on their own.

Extortion without encryption is on the rise. A small, but important 7% said that their data was not encrypted, but they were held to ransom anyway, possibly because the attackers had managed to steal their information. In 2020, this figure was 3%.

“Recovering from a ransomware attack can take years and is about so much more than just decrypting and restoring data,” said Wisniewski. “Whole systems need to be rebuilt from the ground up and then there is the operational downtime and customer impact to consider, and much more. Further, the definition of what constitutes a ‘ransomware’ attack is evolving. For a small, but significant minority of respondents, the attacks involved payment demands without data encryption. 

This could be because they had anti-ransomware technologies in place to block the encryption stage or because the attackers simply chose not to encrypt the data. It is likely that the attackers were demanding payment in return for not leaking stolen information online. A recent example of this approach involved the Clop ransomware gang and a known financially-motivated threat actor hitting around a dozen alleged victims with extortion-only attacks.  “In short, it is more important than ever to protect against adversaries at the door, before they get a chance to take hold and unfold their increasingly multi-faceted attacks. Fortunately, if organisations are attacked, they don’t have to face this challenge alone. Support is available 24/7 in the form of external security operations centres, human-led threat hunting and incident response services.”