A company paid nearly a billion dollars in response to a Ransomware virus

The recovery cost from a blackmail virus attack has doubled, and 92 percent of ransom companies don’t get all their data back.

Recovery from a blackmail virus attack is twice as expensive now as it was a year earlier, according to a Sophos State of Ransomware 2021 report. The total recovery cost from blackmail virus attacks has reached nearly two million dollars in one year.

The research was conducted in 5,400 companies in 30 countries worldwide, with no Hungarians among them. The result was: recovery costs, including lost time, lost orders, operating expenses, and other factors, increased from an average of $ 761,106 in 2020 to $1.85 million (or $554 million).

The average ransom paid was $ 170,404, or $ 51 million. This means that the average cost of recovering from an attack is already ten times the ransom. Most paid out about $10,000, but ten organizations were willing to pay more than $1 million, including a company that gave $3.2 million to an extortionist.

What’s more, success isn’t complete either, with only 8 percent of companies paying ransoms getting all their data back.

The proportion of firms that paid the ransom rose from 26 percent in 2020 to 32 percent by 2021.