Sophos produces one of the top endpoint protection softwares on the market today. Recently, they announced a new survey regarding ransomware and the stats are very concerning. While Covid captures the attention right now, ransomware continues to be an ongoing problem that touches half of all businesses each year.

The survey shows that ransomware continues to be a worldwide problem. In fact, over half (51%) of all businesses in the survey get beat by ransomware each year. But the businesses have done well in recovering their data – 94% of the time. Over half (56%) got their data back by using their backups, while another 26% paid the ransom.

But big or small the costs are going up. On average over $732,000 was spent to resolve the impacts. If the organization paid the ransom it cost over $1.4 million in total impact cost. Paying the ransom doesn’t necessarily reduce the amount of work to be done.

While the trends aren’t completely compelling nearly 45% of ransomware attacks arrive via email. 21% are the result of an attack on a server. Targeting servers is one of the key changes by ransomware attackers, they used to target desktops. 9% are mis-configured cloud instances, with another 9% of attacks coming in via RDP. You’ll also want to watch your vendors because 9% of the attacks came in from a supplier. The final major entry point was USB or removable media devices – 7%. Never put a USB or removeable device in a PC if you don’t know where it came from.

What was potentially surprising was that 59% of the attacks where the data was encrypted involved data in a public cloud.

The key news here was that Sophos’ first recommendation is to “start with the assumption that you will be hit”.

To download the full report – start here —> https://news.sophos.com/en-us/2020/05/12/the-state-of-ransomware-2020/