The risk associated with ransomware attacks continues to grow, and financial consequences for organizations become increasingly severe. Ransomware is malicious software that encrypts victim’s data and demands ransom for decryption – however, payment does not guarantee access recovery.
The losses resulting from a ransomware attack are substantial. This is more than double the previous value of $41,198. The upward trend continues, with latest data indicating even higher amounts.
This amount refers not only to the ransom paid but also includes equipment replacement and repair costs, lost revenue, and in some cases, loss of company reputation. Operational downtime can last from several days to several weeks, generating losses many times exceeding the ransom itself. Additional costs include post-incident investigation, data breach notifications, and potential regulatory fines.
Why do ransomware victims still pay the ransom? Many organizations lack current, tested backups, making payment the only option for data recovery. Time pressure – especially in healthcare or critical infrastructure sectors – often outweighs long-term consequences of funding criminal activity.
What risks do we face if we don’t properly protect our business against cyber threats? Modern ransomware groups employ double extortion tactics – before encrypting data, they steal it, threatening public disclosure if payment is refused. Some groups escalate to triple extortion, contacting victims’ customers or partners directly.
Effective protection requires a multi-layered approach: regular offline-stored backups, network segmentation, employee training, system updates, and tools for detecting and blocking malware. An incident response plan should be prepared and tested before an attack occurs.
The shift that changed the defence
For years the answer to ransomware was backup: if you can restore, you do not pay. Extortion models adapted. Groups now take the data out before encrypting anything, and the demand is no longer about the key — it is about publication. A perfect backup answers the availability problem entirely and the disclosure problem not at all.
The practical consequence is that recovery planning and prevention stopped being alternatives. Backups still decide how long the outage lasts, but avoiding the second demand depends on the things that stop bulk data leaving the network in the first place, and on noticing that it is happening while it still matters. Designing both halves together — the restore path and the detection around it — is what backup and disaster recovery covers when it is treated as a security control rather than as storage housekeeping.
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