Intelligent CISO Issue 26 | Page 19

cyber trends paying the ransom makes little difference to the recovery burden in terms of time and cost. This could be because it is unlikely that a single magical decryption key is all that’s needed to recover. Often, the attackers may share several keys and using them to restore data may be a complex and time-consuming affair,” said Chester Wisniewski, Principal Research Scientist, Sophos. More than half (56%) of the IT managers surveyed were able to recover their data from backups without paying the ransom, compared to 66% in the UAE. In a very small minority of cases (1%), paying the ransom did not lead to the recovery of data. This figure rose to 5% for public sector organisations. In fact, 13% of the public sector organisations surveyed never managed to restore their encrypted data, compared to 6% overall. However, contrary to popular belief, the public sector was least affected by ransomware, with just 45% of the Chester Wisniewski – Principal Research Scientist, Sophos www.intelligentciso.com | Issue 26 19