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Strong and stable, my arse. UK wobbles when coping with ransomware

Even worse than France. FRANCE!

A third of businesses have suffered a ransomware attack in the last 12 months, according to a new survey sponsored by Malwarebytes.

Globally, most organisations experienced some form of attack or breach during the past year, with 35 per cent suffering a ransomware attack specifically. Ransomware demands are relatively low, with nearly three in five of the infected organisations reporting extortionate demands of $1,000 or less.

In the UK, almost 20 per cent of businesses have little or no confidence they could stop ransomware, compared to a global average of 10.7 per cent, a fear that the effects of the recent WannaCrypt attack on the NHS only partly explain. Almost half (46 per cent) of UK organisations hit by ransomware wound up losing files – the highest among the geographies surveyed.

British orgs also expressed the greatest willingness to pay ransoms with 43.1 per cent opting to cough up compared to 15.9 per cent in France, a lamentably weak and wobbly showing by Team GB against a nation sometimes referred to as cheese-eating surrender monkeys.

Most of the 37 Brit organisations who admitted any ransomware problems said they had been hit more than five times during the past year. The UK also turned out to be the most clueless nation when it comes to identifying the source of ransomware, with 35.4 per cent not knowing where it came from compared to just 8.6 per cent of American groups who confessed to being equally ignorant.

Downtime caused by a ransomware attack could be more devastating than the fees demanded. For 15 per cent of affected organisations in the UK (or around one in seven), a ransomware infection caused 25 or more hours of downtime.

The survey involved polling firms with up to 1,000 employees in North America, France, UK, Germany, Australia, and Singapore. Osterman Research surveyed a total of 1,054 companies worldwide as part of the study, explained in more depth in Malwarebytes' Second Annual State of Ransomware Report. ®

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