Ransomware Payments More Than Doubled in Q4 2019

In the fourth quarter of 2019, ransomware cost more than doubled. The average ransom surged to $84,116; this is a massive increase of 104% from $ 41,198 within the fourth quarter of 2019. This report indicates that cybersecurity systems are not getting any better.

The Coveware report indicates that this reflects how specific variants of ransomware, such as Sodinokibi and Ryuk, are increasingly used to target victims of big companies to defraud them.

For example, Ryuk’s ransom cost for victims has reached an incredible $780,000 to get their data decrypted. According to a statement by Coveware, the price of ransom for data decryption showed how diverse and active these perpetrators were in the last quarter. Again, this situation also reveals that there have been aggressive attacks on companies with more sophisticated infrastructure.

However, the Coveware report describes how ransomware variants such as Snatch, Netwalker, and Dharma affect a large number of small companies, but with a ransom payment of only $1,500.

Of course, nobody wants to pay offenders who have disrupted their network and compromised their services. It may not be right to pay a ransom. However, some companies that are directly involved consider it as the best approach for ensuring that the business continues seamlessly, especially when they find that restoring the stolen files from the backup system is not as easy as they imagined.

The reassuring news for the affected companies is that in the fourth quarter of 2019, about 98% of companies that paid the ransom seemed to have received an effective decryption system. However, the cost of a ransom varies depending on the set of ransomware criminals that invaded a particular business system. Additionally, before you consider paying a ransom, it is always good to explore different variants of ransomware and identify its potential group of hackers; this will help you plan a future course of action to secure your systems better.

Ransomware is evolving and finding new ways to increase the strength of its attacks, and this has complicated the cybercrime situation at the moment.

If anything is evident in the Coveware report, it’s as follows: Anyone who tells you that ransomware is a threat that has been nullified is entirely mistaken. Ransomware is a cyber enemy that has continued to influence many companies successfully. Some companies have been thrown out of business for weeks and have even closed permanently in some cases.

Downtime Is Increasing

In addition to raising the average ransomware payments, the average downtime caused by the company’s ransomware attacks went from 12.1 days in Q3 2019 to 16.2 days in Q4 2019.

This increase was also linked to the increasing ransomware attacks against large companies, which are always forced to recover their systems for several weeks. “Established businesses have more complex systems and retrieving data by a decryption or backup as the case may take longer than recovering the network for smaller companies.

Regardless of the time taken to restore stolen data the backup, it is also as vulnerable as the hacked data. There is a danger that the same attack could occur again, and this leaves the companies “balanced on a knife’s edge.”

Therefore, the best solution is to ensure robust security patch systems that will make it impossible for any cyberattack, Mukkamala, CEO RickSense advised.