Ransomware attacks are becoming more severe with businesses suffering from infections being out for up to 16.2 days on average, up from 12.1 days in the third quarter of 2019.
That is according to new research from cybersecurity company Coveware. It noted that getting the business back up and running could easily become a time-consuming ordeal.
“Reconnecting that backup and restoring a large amount of data can be very time consuming. It is a huge project and frankly has to be practiced beyond theoretical table-top exercises,” Bill Siegel, CEO of Coveware told ZDNet.
Not only are the attacks costing businesses money due to their services being down, but the ransom demands are becoming bigger too. Between the third and the fourth quarter of 2019, the average demand more than doubled from $41,198 to $84,116.
The severity of the system outages has grown as hackers are upping their efforts against larger firms.
Foreign currency exchange company Travelex has experienced the worsened situation first hand.
On New Year’s Eve 2019, it discovered that it was suffering a ransomware attack. To protect its systems, Travelex responded by suspending all its digital services, which also affected partners Samsung Pay, that used Travelex’s services and were also crippled by the attack.
The virus that caused all the problems has been identified as Sidinokibi. The malware is also known as REvil. It has been named as one of the four worst ransomware programs out there.
Almost two weeks later, Travelex reported that it was starting to reboot some of its digital services.
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