Tag Archive for: Costs

Ransomware hit usually costs PH firm about $1M, says Fortinet

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MANILA  -A Philippine company usually spends about P55 million or about $1 million to resolve a single data breach and pay off ransom to regain system access, according to cybersecurity company Fortinet, as perpetrators are financially motivated to keep on launching cyberattacks.

Fortinet Philippines country manager Alan Reyes, in press briefing on Thursday, said that the “financial gain is always there as a motivation for the people” to exploit corporate networks.

He said that the multi-million spending to recover data from ransomware — an attack that holds one entity’s data or system hostage until a ransom is paid — was the current “market price” companies are willing to pay.

However, Reyes stressed that paying off ransom does not guarantee absolute protection as perpetrators might just repeat the attack and demand money again.

According to the company’s “H1 2023 Global Threat Landscape” report, the daily number of cyber threats detected in the country during the second quarter was 17.7 million, an uptick from 15 million the previous quarter.

READ: 50% of firms with cyberdefenses still victimized

Broken down, most of the cyber threats are botnets, which can enable hackers to steal data, send spam and illegally obtain access to devices.

Reyes explained the increase in cyberattacks could have been aided by artificial technology (AI), which can help threat actors in creating their exploits.

Noushin Shabab, senior security researcher of Kaspersky’s Global Research and Analysis Team in Asia Pacific, previously explained that AI could be used in lodging advanced persistent threats, a cyberattack that seeks to obtain unauthorized access into a computer network and tends to avoid detection for an extended period.


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The Data Center Ransomware Attack That Costs You Everything | Data Center Knowledge

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I work closely with our editorial team here at DCK, and we often throw ideas around as to what to cover. It’s not often that a topic of conversation breaks my heart.

When discussing security in the data center, we often discuss physical security, gates, fences, and biometrics. We also discuss cybersecurity, infrastructure segmentation, proper network security, and isolation. But I always wonder how many folks here take these little golden nuggets of wisdom and apply them.

Related: Data Centers Can Fend Off DoS Attacks by Taking a Layered Approach

In a recent post on DCK, I dove into physical security because, for the very first time, our AFCOM State of the Data Center 2023 report saw multiple types of physical human threats emerge into the top five of the biggest threats against critical infrastructure. Today, we focus on what topped that list — ransomware.

And I’ll fill you in on a little secret. It’s not the first year that ransomware was at the top of the charts. For the seventh year in a row, and surprising no one reading this, ransomware hit the top of the list. Remember, every connected device is a target as it relates to data. When asked to indicate the top five security and infrastructure threats to their companies, respondents were by far more likely to mention ransomware (52%), followed by loss of PII (39%) and outside human threats (39%).

Related: The Ransomware Crisis Deepens, While Data Recovery Stalls

All of these security threats can create downtime. And that quickly becomes costly. According to the Uptime Institute’s 2022 Outage Analysis, the consequences and cost of downtime are worsening, with 60% of failures now resulting in at least $100,000 in total losses. They also found that when significant outages happen, over 85% of the incidents stem from staff failing to follow procedures or flaws in the processes themselves.

Data Center Outage Math

But what happens when it’s not just downtime? What happens if a ransomware attack costs you everything?

After a devastating ransomware attack, that’s precisely what happened to a Danish cloud provider.

The ransomware encryption attack that cost CloudNordic everything

On the night of Friday,…

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One simple way to cut ransomware recovery costs in half

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Whichever way you look at the data, it is considerably cheaper to use backups to recover from a ransomware attack than to pay the ransom. The median recovery cost for those that use backups is half the cost incurred by those that paid the ransom, according to a recent study. Similarly, the mean recovery cost is almost $1 million lower for those that used backups. Despite this fact, the use of backups is actually falling.

This was one of the most prominent findings in the recent Sophos State of Ransomware survey. Let’s take a closer look at the report’s conclusions.

The state of ransomware

Sophos recently published an independent, vendor-agnostic report about the impact of ransomware worldwide. The survey included 3,000 IT and cybersecurity leaders in organizations with between 100 and 5,000 employees across 14 countries in the Americas, EMEA and Asia Pacific. The study was conducted between January and March 2023, and the participants responded based on their experiences over the past year.

According to the report, the rate of attacks stayed constant, with 66% of respondents reporting that they were hit by ransomware during the last year. In 2022, respondents reported the exact same percentage. While this might be a good sign, it’s notable that in 2021 the rate was only 37%.

Does size matter?

The Sophos study revealed a distinct correlation between annual revenue and the chances of being a victim of ransomware. For companies with revenue of $10 to $50 million, 56% experienced a ransomware attack in the last year. Meanwhile, 72% of those with revenue of $5 billion or more were victims of ransomware.

Surprisingly, there was no strong relationship between ransomware attacks and company headcount. The rate of ransomware attacks was consistent, with 62-63% of companies of all sizes experiencing ransomware incidents. The only exception was that companies with 1,001 to 3,000 employees had a 73% rate. One might think that larger workforces would lead to more attacks as the attack surface is larger, but this study did not find that to be the…

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Ransomware Costs Financial Services $32bn in Five Years

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Global financial services organizations have lost over $32bn in downtime since 2018 due to ransomware breaches, a new report has claimed.

Comparitech analyzed 225 confirmed attacks on the sector over the past five years and found that the average organization loses two weeks in downtime due to an incident.

Read more on ransomware: Financial Industry Faces Soaring Ransomware Threat

“If no specific figures were given for downtime, i.e. ‘several days,’ ‘one month’ or ‘back to 80% after 6 weeks’ were quoted, we created estimates from these figures based on the lowest figure they could be,” explained Comparitech head of data research, Rebecca Moody.

“For example, ‘several days’ were calculated as three, ‘one month’ was calculated as the number of days in the month the attack happened, and the number of weeks quoted in % recovery statements was used (e.g. six weeks per the previous example).”

The firm then worked out costs using a 2017 report which calculated downtime across 20 sectors at $8662 per minute. Moody noted that some studies have put the figure much higher, at $9.3m per hour for the banking sector. That would put total ransomware downtime losses for the vertical at a staggering $581bn over the five-year period.

Among the sub-sectors analyzed in the financial sector were credit unions, accounting companies, public and retail banks and insurers.

Of these, insurance companies recorded the highest number of attacks over the period (65).

On top of downtime-related losses, Comparitech attempted to quantify how much was paid out to online extortionists since 2018. Demands varied from $180,000 to $40m, with the average demand peaking in 2021 at $61.6m, although the figure was made public in only a few cases.

In fact, 2021 was the biggest year for ransomware attacks on finance companies, with 86 recorded in total, followed by 2020 (56).

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