3 reasons why ransomware is rising

Ransomware is expected to cause over $30 billion in global damages this year. An attack on a business is predicted every 2 seconds by 2031, up from every 11 seconds in 2022. Why does it get harder each year to contain and stop this growing threat? Organizations striving for cyber resilience confront numerous challenges. Several are listed below.

1. People challenges

Humans aren’t perfect. The most prevalent ransomware attacks happen through phishing emails and stolen credentials—the latter making up 40% of ransomware attacks.

• Organizations lack the time and resources to properly educate and train employees and partners in security awareness to counter attacks (e.g., phishing).
• IT and security roles are siloed. Almost one third of SecOps respondents (31%) recently surveyed believe collaboration with IT is not strong, with 9% of those respondents calling it “weak.”

2. Organizational and process challenges

Although ransomware dwell times have been steadily dropping, studies report lag times between 21 and 11 days still exist. Security workflows and information-sharing processes ill-designed to counter these threats are a primary culprit. For example:

• Patching vulnerable applications and systems is time consuming and costly.
• Legacy systems that can help with defense, such as backup, require IT specialists.
• Attack surfaces are wider, making data everywhere harder to protect.
• Disaster recovery “runbooks” are common, but most don’t account for the complexities of ransomware response and recovery.

3. Technology challenges

The Global DataSphere is expected to more than double in size from 2022 to 2026 with enterprise organizations driving most of the data growth, according to IDC . Many technology environments, particularly those with a patchwork of best-of-breed products and disparate security and infrastructure platforms, weren’t architectured to handle data on-premises, in the cloud, and at the edge at such scale. With data exploding—so many different types, in so many different locations—these environments are buckling under the pressure of ransomware.

• Existing solutions aren’t well integrated, resulting in persistent complexity.
• Cloud and hybrid environments introduce new challenges in protecting and recovering from ransomware.
• Economic uncertainty is prompting questions about whether to increase security investments or optimize what currently exists.
• Most technologies aren’t able to leverage the efficiency and scaling artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) help enable.

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