A new threat report indicates that nearly half of all organizations that pay a ransom to cybercriminals are unable to recover their stolen data. Reasons include faulty decryptors, corrupted data, or attackers simply refusing to provide the decryption key even after payment.
Business Impact
This data is critical for executive decision-making. It shatters the assumption that paying the ransom is a viable or guaranteed path to recovery. Organizations can end up paying millions, only to *still* have to rebuild from backups, all while their data remains exfiltrated and at risk.
Why It Happened
Ransomware is an untrustworthy criminal enterprise. Attackers may use flawed encryption, or the encryption/decryption process itself may corrupt large database files. In other cases, attackers simply take the money and disappear.
Recommended Executive Action
Incorporate this statistic into your incident response plan and executive tabletop exercises. The primary focus *must* be on detection, containment, and recovery from offline/immutable backups, not on the ransom payment as a solution. Prevention and resilient backups are the only effective defenses.
Hashtags: #Ransomware #CyberAttack #DataRecovery #IncidentResponse #CyberRisk #InfoSec #BusinessContinuity