Ransomware Threat Awareness Rising Among IT Security Experts

Almost half of IT security staff know at least one company that has been hit by ransomware attacks, designed to lock victims out of critical files until a monetary ransom is provided.

It’s a frightening threat with a growing amount of apprehension related to ransomware, with more security experts aware of the potential problem.  However, it remains difficult to educate employees on methods to detect fraudulent emails and train them to delete those types of emails.

Here is what Stu Sjouwerman, KnowBe4 CEO, said in a press statement:

“We thought it would be interesting to use the same questions to see what impact ransomware has had in six months time.  We found the threat of ransomware is very real and IT professionals are increasingly realizing traditional solutions like endpoint security are failing.  IT pros agree that end-user Security Awareness Training is one of the most effective security practices to combat these ransomware threats.”

Most ransomware require victims to either pay the ransom or try to restore files from a backup – but with many users, especially at small and midsize businesses lacking reliable IT resources, it can be many months before a proper data backup is done.

In the survey, 57 percent of respondents said if their backups fail, they’d have no other option but to pay the ransom.  If that wasn’t bad enough, 50-66 percent of backups fail, while data stored in the cloud is lost.

Thank you to KnowBe4 for providing us with this information