MalwareBytes did a survey of 540 CIOs, CISOs and IT Directors from companies with an average of 5,400 employees across the U.S., Canada, U.K. and Germany and found that on average, nearly 40 percent of businesses suffered some form of ransomware during the previous year.

Nathan Scott, Senior Security Researcher at Malwarebytes, said: “Over the last four years, ransomware has evolved into one of the biggest cyber security threats in the wild, with instances of ransomware in exploit kits increasing 259 percent in the last five months alone. Until now, very few studies have examined the current prevalence and ramifications of actual ransomware incidents in the enterprise.”

Here are the figures:

• 46 percent of all ransomware attacks originated from email.

• Nearly 60 percent of all ransomware attacks on companies demanded over $1,000. Over 20 percent of attacks asked for more than $10,000, 1 percent even asked for over $150,000.

• More than 40 percent of victims paid the ransom demands.

• More than 60 percent of attacks took more than 9 hours to remediate.

• Healthcare and financial services were the leading industries attacked with ransomware.

• 3.5 percent even said lives were at stake because of ransomware’s debilitating effects.

• Over 71% of companies are concentrating on backing up data rather than security.

Source: MalwareBytes