According to a recent report by Intermedia, a one-stop shop for cloud business applications, fixing the damages caused by a ransomware attack can be way more expensive than paying a ransom to fix the problem and recover the company’s encrypted data. 72% of the affected companies by ransomware are not able to access the encrypted data for at least two days while 32% of companies can have an even harder time without being able to access their data for at least 5 days.
“If you've got a large number of users and downtime runs into multiple days, then the cost of that downtime adds up pretty quickly to the kind of ransom amounts that cybercriminals are demanding potentially,” according to Intermedia senior vice president of security products Richard Walters.
The downtime according to Walters usually takes more than two days and the company keeps losing data even if it has been in a way prepared for the malware and has backed the data up. “You have to contain the infected systems, then wipe them completely and then restore them. That process in more than half these cases took longer than two days,” Walters said for TechNewsWorld.
In most cases, paying a ransom can be a cheaper solution to solve the problem for most companies, as the restoration of data is more expensive and usually takes more time.
Companies faced with the decision between paying a ransom or restoring their systems from backups could find that it would cost them less to pay the ransom. The gap between paying a ransom and data restoration can be even larger the bigger the company is. Cyber extortionists are well aware of this, and that is why they are starting to target big companies that are willing to pay as much as it takes to get their data back safe, and since it is going to cost them less to pay a ransom, their options get pretty limited.
"If you pay the ransom, there's a one in five chance you won't get your data back,” Walters noted adding that there are even worse cases.
According to the report, almost 60% of businesses hit by a ransomware had 100 employees or more, while 25% had more than 1,000 workers. The percentages change from time to time, as more big companies get targeted.
In the meantime, the security of cloud is still uncertain. Many companies keep getting their data stolen due to cloud’s lack of safety. According to a Evolve IP survey, out of 1000 companies that took part on the survey, 55% of them admitted that one of the main reasons why they step back from moving their data into the cloud is because the uncertainty of cloud security. Similar surveys by Evolve conducted in 2013 and 2014, showed almost the same results as in 2016.
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