The costs incurred from global ransomware damage are predicted to exceed $11.5 million annually by 2019. And this forecast was given by Washington based firm Cybersecurity Ventures, which researches and reports on cybercrime costs, the market size of cybersecurity market and its spending forecasts.
In the official 2017 Ransomware Report, announced early this week by Cybersecurity Ventures it’s clearly mentioned that hackers will launch ransomware attacks on businesses every 14 seconds by the end of 2019. However, the said estimate doesn’t take into account the attacks happening on individuals, which could occur even more frequently than in businesses.
“Generally, there is a myth among IT populace that ransomware costs are limited to ransom payouts. But there is much more financially involved in reality which is often ignored or is never reported. This is totally wrong, as the repercussions of ransomware attack are many in financial terms. It involves recovering from the cyber attacks, taking proactive measures to avoid such situations in future and training employees to encounter such situations smartly”, said Stu Sjouwerman, the CEO of KnowBe4, a company which trains employees on how to detect and responds to ransomware attacks. And co-sponsor of the ransomware report.
“Ransomware attack costs involve damage and destruction of data, downtime, lost productivity, post-attack disruption to the normal course of business, forensic investigation, restoration and deletion of hostage data and systems, employee training in direct response to ransomware attacks”, says Steve Morgan, the founder and Editor in Chief of Cybersecurity Ventures.
Morgan added in the media briefing that CIOs, CTOs, and IT security teams should heighten their awareness and response plans around the ransomware threat. This has to be done in such a way that every IT worker understands exactly what ransomware is and how it infects organizations and how to combat it.
Cybersecurity Ventures estimates that the cost of cybercrime will exceed $6 trillion annually by 2021- up from $3 trillion in 2015.
Log on to Cybersecurity Ventures website to know more details on how the Ransomware market will evolve in coming years.
