A new report from a cybersecurity provider in Pittsburgh claimed that 20% of all ransomware attacks on businesses that it has ever received reports on have occurred in the past 12 months as scams are increasingly impacting consumers and businesses.
Ransomware is a type of malicious software that can be downloaded to computers or other systems that prevents users from accessing these systems until a sum of money is paid to the attackers.
Per the latest annual report from Hornetsecurity Group, which is based in Germany but calls offices in Bakery Square the home of its U.S. operations, a survey of more than 2,000 IT leaders found that 24% of them reported being a victim of a ransomware attack, with one in five of those surveyed reporting that these incidents occurred in the past year.
At least 19% of respondents in 2022 said they do not have a disaster recovery plan in place should they ever find themselves in the midst of an attack. That's up from the 16% of respondents who said the same in 2021, Hornetsecurity said.
Additionally, about 7% of the responding victims of ransomware reported that they paid the scammers to retrieve their data while 14% admitted that they lost their data completely, the report found.
"Attacks on businesses are increasing, and there is a shocking lack of awareness and preparation by IT pros," Hornetsecurity CEO Daniel Hofmann said in a press release. "Our survey shows that many in the IT community have a false sense of security."
Horneysecuirty found that the most common source of ransomware attacks came from phishing emails, with 58.6% of all attacks reported being traced to inboxes. It also found that server infrastructure and network storage are the most common target in a ransomware attack, representing 56% of those reported.
"The increase in overall incidence rate, and the fact that one in 20 IT professionals have experienced a ransomware attack in the last 12 months clearly indicates that organizations need to remain vigilant, especially as they begin to shift their IT infrastructure into the cloud," the report's conclusion said.
A copy of the full report can be found here.
