The 2022 State of Ransomware Report
Sophos has released its 2022 ransomware report based on real-world IT professionals’ experiences last year, across mid-sized organizations in 31 different countries. The study concluded that the number of attacks is up, with increasing complexity and impact. About 2/3 of organizations involved in this study indicated that they were hit by ransomware in 2021, which represents an increase of 78% over the previous year. Ransomware works by encrypting a company’s data so they cannot access it until they pay the ransom. The success rate of these attacks increased to 65% of organizations having the data encrypted as a direct consequence of the attacks, from 54% in the previous year. Lastly, 4% of the victims experienced an extortion-only attack where data was not encrypted but there was a threat to expose the data publicly.