Survey reveals that 59% of office workers pay for ransomware cyber attacks

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A survey conducted by California based company Intermedia says that 59% of office workers in US pay for ransomware attacks out of their pockets to decrypt files. And that’s due to the fact that most of them do not know how to respond to the malware infection and how to proceed after an attack has impacted their digital assets.

Only Seventy percent of office workers say that their employer regularly communicates about cyber threats and helps in creating awareness on what’s happening in the cyber world.

Mountain View Company Intermedia discovered in its survey that 29% of respondents feel that cyber attacks are biggest threat to data loss, second only to the 30% of respondents who cited hardware failure.

Out of 1000 respondents who participated in the survey conducted by the cloud business applications provider, only 37% said that their employer has paid for the ransom demand. And only 2% said that no ransom was paid to hackers when their assets where hit by ransomware.

This clearly suggests that most of the US office workers are still in a state of mind of paying to the hackers when they become victims of a cyber attack.

Jonathan Levine, the Chief Technology Officer of Intermedia said that the practice of paying to hackers/ransomware developers can encourage them to launch more such attacks on the same targets on future.

He said that the survey also found that 0.5% of victims who pay the ransom receive a decryption key on return. The rest all are either asked for more crypto currency or have to resort to other solutions such as replacing the hardware and software and using backups for data continuity.

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Naveen Goud is a writer at Cybersecurity Insiders covering topics such as Mergers & Acquisitions, Startups, Cyber Attacks, Cloud Security and Mobile Security

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