The Ransomware Report 2023 from Cybersecurity Insiders and BullWall offers findings from a survey of 435 cybersecurity professionals across several sectors, showing that ransomware remains a top concern, and the effectiveness of remediation steps are often misunderstood. Although 76% were confident in the organization’s ability to prevent an attack, only 35% were confident in the organization’s current ability to remediate ransomware after it locks or encrypts data within their systems. Moreover, 79% expect their organization to be a ransomware target within the next year.
I have two views on this. The first is from Mark Bermingham, VP, Cyware:
“This research highlights the general apathy around a serious situation with EDR. If these numbers were about threats to individuals’ retirement income you would hear a lot more alarm bells. Better solutions exist and many are already deployed, but we need better tools for dealing with all the threat noise, connecting these dots with existing tools, and taking proactive action.“
Roy Akerman, Co-Founder & CEO, Rezonate follows up with this:
“We often see that despite controls put in place to prevent ransomware, they are often misconfigured and therefore not able to prevent and at best detect active encryption attempts. Proactively simulating ransomware-type attacks can help an organization assure existing security investments are fully utilized and properly configured. Increasing readiness in case of an actual attack against their infrastructure. The Ransomware readiness architecture highlights actions to be taken pre- and post-attacks across prevention, detection, investigation, and recovery and only once we proactively take these actions across the complete cycle, we are able to truly reduce risk.”
What this says to me is that organizations need to wrap their head around getting better defences in place to mitigate ransomware attacks. If they don’t they are guaranteed to be the next headline that I write about.