Hiawatha Bray reports:
To pay or not to pay? For organizations victimized by ransomware, that’s a tricky question that may not have a good answer. A report from the Boston tech security firm Cybereason argues that paying off cybercriminals may not get businesses off the hook.
In a global survey of nearly 1,300 security professionals, two-thirds said that their company had suffered a significant financial loss due to an ransomware attack. About one-third of the victims had paid a ransom. But of those, 80 percent said they suffered a subsequent attack after paying, often by the same criminals responsible for the original breach.
The report also said that while most victims who paid got their data back, 46 percent found that some or all of the data had been corrupted, making it difficult or impossible to use.
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