WASHINGTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Crowd Research Partners today released the 2017 Ransomware Report, which shows that companies and government agencies are overwhelmed by frequent, severe ransomware attacks, which have now become the #1 cyber threat to organizations.
Commissioned by Cybersecurity Insiders, this new ransomware study is based on a comprehensive online survey of 516 cybersecurity professionals, providing insight into the latest ransomware trends together with guidance on addressing the evolving ransomware threat.
The resulting 2017 Ransomware Report is the most comprehensive research on the topic to date, revealing how corporate IT and security professionals are dealing with the evolving ransomware threat, and how organizations are preparing to better protect their critical data and IT infrastructure.
“In many respects, ransomware is a game changer. It is incredibly easy and inexpensive for cybercriminals to execute highly profitable attacks on a global scale,” said Holger Schulze, CEO and Founder of Cybersecurity Insiders. “Many organizations are alarmingly unprepared for the ransomware onslaught.”
Report highlights include:
- Ransomware is the fastest growing security threat, perceived as a moderate or extreme threat by 80% of cybersecurity professionals. 75% of organizations affected by ransomware experienced up to 5 attacks in the last 12 months alone, 25% experienced 6 or more attacks. Only a small fraction of respondents say they would pay the ransom or negotiate with the attackers.
- Email and web use represent the most common ransomware infection vectors with employees opening malicious email attachments (73%), responding to a phishing email (54%) or visiting a compromised website (28%). From a solution perspective, the majority of identified ransomware attacks were detected through endpoint security tools (83%), email and web gateways (64%), and intrusion detection systems (46%).
- Security professionals rank user awareness training the most effective tactic to prevent and block ransomware (77%), followed by endpoint security solutions (73%), and patching of operating systems (72%) as preventive approaches to ransomware threats. 51% are only slightly to moderately confident of their organization’s ransomware defense.
- A majority (54%) say they could recover from a successful ransomware attack within a day, while 39% estimate it will take more than one day to a few weeks to recover. Speed of recovery is absolutely mission-critical as business cost escalates with every hour the business cannot fully operate.
Download the complete report here: https://www.cybersecurity-insiders.com/portfolio/2017-ransomware-report/
The 2017 Ransomware Report was produced in partnership with leading cybersecurity vendors: AlienVault, Barkly, Bitdefender, Cybereason, D3 Security, Evident.io, Forcepoint, IRONSCALES, Securonix, SentinelOne, TEHTRIS, Tenable, Vectra, and Veriato.
About Crowd Research Partners:
Crowd Research Partners creates unique, fact-based thought leadership content that delivers market insight and benchmarks for today’s cybersecurity professionals and vendors. For more information visit http://www.crowdresearchpartners.com.