Ransomware incidents remain a scourge on UK society. Based on interviews with victims and incident responders, this paper outlines the harm ransomware causes to organisations, individuals, the UK …
A recent independent, vendor-agnostic survey of 200 IT professionals in medium-sized organisations in South Africa painted a rather dismal picture of the effects of ransomware on the respondents’ organisations.
As part of the larger project undertaken by an independent research company for Sophos, the resulting report – The State of Ransomware 2023 – discussed the findings from interviews with 3 000 IT/cyber security leaders across 14 countries.
Conducted between January and March this year, the survey covered the experiences of the respondents over the past 12 months regarding ransomware. One of the key findings was that there was a considerable increase in the number of South African organisations affected by ransomware attacks in the past year.
“It is very sobering to realise that there was a 27% increase in organisations affected by ransomware attacks, from last year’s 51%. And this is higher than the global average of 66%, indicating that South African organisations are indeed very vulnerable to attack,” says Charleen Rheeder, Product Manager and Shared Service Support from the Elvey Group (part of the Hudaco Group of companies), local distributor of Sophos technology.
A staggering 89% of all attacks in SA resulted in data being encrypted, which again is higher than the global average – at 76%. It is also significantly higher than the figure – just 12 months previously – where data was encrypted in 45% of data in South African attacks. In addition, data was stolen in 35% of these attacks, higher than the global average of 30%.
“Where South Africa did outshine the global market was in the complete recovery of encrypted data, which is 3% better than the global average. Furthermore, there was a decrease in 4% of affected organisations paying the ransom, bringing it to 2% lower than the global average of 47%. Sadly, though, two local organisations paid a hefty ransom of over $5 million each,” says Rheeder.
The average cost (excluding ransom payments) of recovery from a ransomware attack was reported at $750 000, including downtime costs, lost business opportunities, device costs, people costs and network costs.
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Cybercrimes are rising both in numbers and sophistication. The latest to find itself on the receiving end was the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) in Delhi, which was hit by a ransomware attack on November 23, rendering its servers non-functional for about two weeks.
As the name might suggest, a ransomware attack is malware in which cybercriminals encrypt data and demand ransom for unlocking the same. In this case, they asked for Rs 200 crore in cryptocurrencies. Although the investigation is on, the minister of state for IT called it “a deliberate and targeted effort”.
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Not just AIIMS but the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) also faced several unsuccessful hacking attempts on November 30. Delhi’s Safdarjung Hospital, too, came under similar attacks, but the impact was limited.
Although the cyberattack at AIIMS brought the focus to cybersecurity, this is not the only ransomware attack to have been perpetrated in the recent past.
In May this year, low-fare airline Spicejet reported a ransomware attack that delayed several flights by up to six hours. “Certain SpiceJet systems faced an attempted ransomware attack last night that impacted and slowed down morning flight departures today,” it said in a statement then. Several passengers vented their anger on social media claiming many had to sit on the plane for hours. Although the attack was thwarted by the airline within hours, it was not revealed what the hackers demanded or what kind of malware affected its systems.
In May 2017, multiple companies the world over were attacked by the WannaCry malware. The malware was so fast-spreading that within two days, it affected over 200,000 in about 150 countries. The hackers demanded ransom in bitcoin.
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