Global financial services institutions have lost more than $32 billion in downtime to ransomware breaches since 2018, according to a new report.
Comparitech analyzed 225 confirmed attacks against the sector over the past five years and found that the average organization lost two weeks of downtime to incidents.
Read more about ransomware: Financial industry faces surging ransomware threat
“If no specific number of downtime is given, i.e. quotes such as ‘days’, ‘1 month’ or ‘back to 80% after 6 weeks’, we We made an estimate based on the lowest possible number from the numbers.” Rebecca Moody, head of data research at Comparitech, said:
“For example, ‘days’ was calculated as 3, ‘month’ was calculated as the number of days in the month when the attack occurred, and the number of weeks quoted in the recovery rate statement was used (e.g. 6 weeks in the example). “
The company then calculated costs using a 2017 report that calculated $8,662 per minute of downtime across 20 sectors. Moody noted that some studies put the figure much higher at $9.3 million an hour in the banking sector. This brings total ransomware downtime losses in this industry to a whopping $581 billion over five years.
Among the subsectors analyzed in the financial sector were credit unions, accounting firms, public and retail banks, and insurance companies.
Of these, insurance companies recorded the highest number of attacks during this period (65).
In addition to downtime-related losses, Comparitech attempted to quantify the amount paid to online extortionists since 2018. Demand ranges from $180,000 to $40 million, with average demand peaking at $61.6 million in 2021, although this figure was only released in 2018. some cases.
In fact, 2021 was the year with the most ransomware attacks against financial firms, with a total of 86 recorded, followed by 2020 (56).
