An ITWeb survey on ransomware, being conducted in partnership with KnowBe4, has gone live. The objective of the survey is to gain a better understanding of how South African organisations have been impacted by and are responding to the ransomware threat.
Anna Collard, SVP of content strategy and evangelist at KnowBe4 Africa, says, “The early days of ransomware just encrypting the data are long gone. Today, the ransomware adversaries do their research to cause their victims significant damage and operational risk. And they are getting pretty good at it.”
Ransomware has evolved to double or triple extortion schemes, including exfiltrating sensitive information and posting it publicly, extorting employees or customers, DDoS attacks against services, or publicly embarrassing their victims.
The early days of ransomware just encrypting the data are long gone.
Anna Collard, KnowBe4.
According to a study conducted by Kaspersky, South Africa ranks third in the world for the highest number of users experiencing targeted ransomware attacks. There was a monstrous 767% increase from 2019 to 2020 in targeted ransomware, whereas general ransomware attacks decreased by 29%. Cyber criminals are now being more precise in their attacks.
According to cybersecurity firm Sophos’ report titled “The State of Ransomware 2021”, in South Africa, the average cost of remediating from a ransomware attack is a whopping $447 097 (~R6.4 million).
There are many different types of ransomware and significant, evolutionary changes are continuing to happen.
The FBI are currently investigating a minimum of 100 different ransomware programs by all sorts of criminals of varying skill levels and experiences who are successfully attacking tens to hundreds of thousands of organisations and people a year. Different ransomware groups also target different industries, sectors and regions. The figures and stats are bound to vary widely.
And things are moving very fast in the ransomware world, making it tricky to get up-to-date figures and statistics.
Collard says: “With US president Biden declaring ransomware a national threat, it puts emerging economies such as South Africa on the map for cyber criminals. We have an advanced economy that in certain sectors is highly cyber dependent and willing to pay up. We also do not have the same national defense nor cyber security power found in developed countries and lack in resources, skills and response capabilities. More alignment and public-private partnerships are needed to solve this challenge.”
We hope you’ll be able set aside a few minutes of your time to participate in the survey, and stand a chance to win a lucky draw prize, a Takealot voucher to the value of R3 000. The ransomware survey is anonymous − you are only asked to leave your details if you choose to enter the lucky draw, and you can rest assured that your identity will never be linked back to the anonymous section.
The detailed results of the survey, and the prize winner, will be published on ITWeb.
To play your role in compiling this ransomware readiness trends report, click on this link.
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