Report: 88% of business leaders would pay the ransom if they were hit by a cyberattack

According to a new report by Kaspersky, in 88% of companies around the world previously attacked by ransomware, company executives would choose to pay a ransom if faced with another attack. For companies that had paid ransoms in the past, 97% were willing to do so again. Of organizations that have not yet been victimized, only 67% would be willing to pay.

Organizations that have been victimized in the past were more inclined to pay as soon as possible to gain immediate access to their data (33% versus 15% of those that have never been victimized) or after just a few days unsuccessful decryption attempts (30% vs. 19%).

Almost two-thirds (64%) of organizations said they had experienced ransomware attacks, and 66% said they expect one to happen at some point and consider it more likely than other common attack types such as DDoS, supply chain, APT, cryptomining or cyber espionage.

Experts urge victims never to pay ransom as it does not guarantee to get your data back and encourages criminals to continue their business. Instead, they recommend reporting incidents to local law enforcement and taking preventive measures, including setting up offline backups, updating software on all corporate devices, enabling ransomware protection on all endpoints, and focusing the defense strategy on detecting lateral ones Movement and data exfiltration to the Internet.

Kaspersky conducted the April 2022 survey of 900 respondents in North America, South America, Africa, Russia, Europe and Asia-Pacific from senior non-IT management (such as CEOs, VPs and directors) and business owners or partners at medium-sized enterprises and Company (50-1000 employees).

Read Kaspersky’s full report.