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The threat of ransomware is becoming widespread among corporations, with almost half of U.S. businesses suffering an attack from the nasty form of malware recently, according to a new survey.
Security firm Malwarebytes sponsored the study, which found in June that 41 percent of U.S. businesses had at least encountered between one to five ransomware attacks in the previous 12 months.
Another 6 percent saw six or more attacks.
The study surveyed corporations in the U.S., Canada, U.K. and Germany to gauge how ransomware affected their operations.
The malware, which can infect a computer and take the data hostage, can be bad for business. Thirty-four percent of the victim corporations in the countries surveyed reported losing revenue because the ransomware had prevented access to important files.
U.S. businesses victimized by the malware generally didn’t suffer a heavy toll and only 6 percent of them reported losing revenue. In most cases, the malicious code only affected personal files.
[...] More amateur cybercriminals are probably indiscriminately spreading ransomware in the U.S. like spam, the survey added. Low-level ransom demands of up to $500 are prevalent in the U.S. However, high ransom demands of more than $10,000 are more common in Germany.
Malwarebytes sponsored Osterman Research to conduct the study by surveying 540 CIOs, CISOs and IT directors across the four countries.
What steps has your company taken to protect against ransomware? Is it enough? What about your personal system(s)?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 05 2016, @09:15PM
It is pretty common, but, it is not always real malware. It might be the survey (which I didn't read) counted pop-ups as "malware". Sometimes, you see pop-ups that block the screen, and claim to be ransomware, and users don't know how to deal with this, so they call the helpdesk.
Had a few clients get the real thing, a few months ago. Most were restored from backups; it was time-consuming but it worked. One couldn't be - a user with local admin rights had stored their personal photos in a folder off the C drive, not watched by backups. They paid it. Another one, they had installed a SQL server and made it integral without contacting IT. They learned to do without the broken database.
Overall things have gotten better, but it's because we got more ruthless in preventing these from reaching users. There is a Software Restriction Policy now on various systems with users prone to this- not unbeatable, it is path-based, but has been a good step. It blocks a few things a week.
The spam filter is more ruthless about blocking attachments now too.