According to a report by UK-based Cyber Security, the global retail sector suffered the highest level of ransomware attacks during 2020, with 44 per cent of organizations (compared to 37 per cent across all industry sectors) affected. This information was given in a report by the firm Sophos on Wednesday.
The report Sophos State of Ransomware in Retail assessed the extent and impact of ransomware attacks on the retail sector worldwide during 2020.
The report revealed that the cross-sector average for repairing a ransomware attack in retail was $185 million, considering total bills, downtime, people time, device costs, network costs, lost opportunities and ransom payments. In comparison, the average was $197 million.
More than half (54 percent) of retail organizations hit by ransomware said that attackers were successful in encrypting their data, while a third (32 percent) paid an average of $147,811 in ransom.
However, payers recovered only two-thirds (67 percent) of their data on average, leaving a third inaccessible and just 9 percent getting all their encrypted data back, the report showed. .
The retail sector has always been an attractive target for cyber attacks, with its complex, distributed IT environment, which includes many connected point-of-sale devices, a relatively ephemeral and non-technical one, Sophos lead research scientist Chester Wisniewski said in a statement. Includes access to a wide range of workforce and personal financial customer data.
The impact of the pandemic, he said, posed additional security challenges, which were increasingly exploited by cybercriminals.
To secure retail IT networks against ransomware and other cyber attacks, Wisniewski advises IT teams to focus resources on three critical areas.
The survey report polled 5,400 IT sector manufacturers including 435 retail IT managers in 30 countries across Europe, the Americas, Asia-Pacific and Central Asia, the Middle East and Africa.