We’ve known ransomware costs for a small- to medium-sized business can be $99,000, per Kapersky Labs. This includes lost business data, productivity and perhaps trade secrets or proprietary information, as well as increased spending on IT security.
A new Vanson Bourne survey, sponsored by SentinelOne of 500 cybersecurity decision makers reveals that recovery from a ransomware infection takes 33 employee hours. Suffering this potential consequence were the 48% of organizations that reported being subjected to at least one ransomware attack during the last 12 months. Ouch… More than one a year?
The latest high-profile victim which was made public (often a company will do its best to hide such a breach) is San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency.
The hacker – using a Russian email address demanded $73,000 and due to infections on the machines processing payments, riders were able to ride trains without paying.
Obviously this was a very expensive attack – it is unknown how much revenue was lost as a result. To learn more, we reached out to Paul Rose of the SFMTA who was not immediately available for comment.
For more, the SFMTA has a blog post from Kristen Holland which has minor details of interest. In addition, reports of hackers threatening to release data have recently surfaced – perhaps 30 GB of personal tracking data.
Bottom line – make sure you have a disaster recovery strategy as getting hit by ransomware is a matter of when, not if and you need to know how to respond quickly when your computers become unusable.