SYDNEY, AUS. – Nov. 13, 2023 – Sophos, a global leader in innovating and delivering cybersecurity as a service, today shared findings from its sector survey report, “The State of Ransomware in Retail 2023,” which found that only 26% of retail organisations this past year were able to disrupt a ransomware attack before their data was encrypted. This is a three-year low for the sector—a decline from 34% in 2021 and 28% in 2022—suggesting the sector is increasingly unable to halt ransomware attacks already in progress.

“Retailers are losing ground in the battle against ransomware. Ransomware criminals have been encrypting increasingly greater percentages of their retail victims in the last three years, as evidenced by the steadily declining rate of retailers stopping cybercriminal attacks in progress. Retailers must up their defensive game by setting up security that detects and responds to intrusions earlier in the attack chain,” said Chester Wisniewski, director, global field CTO, Sophos.

In addition, the report found that, for those retail organisations that paid the ransom, their median recovery costs (not including the ransom payment) were four times the recovery costs of those that used backups to recover their data ($3,000,000 versus $750,000).

“Forty-three percent of retail victims paid the ransom according to our survey respondents, yet the median recovery cost to victims who paid the ransom was four times the cost to those who used backups and other recovery methods. There are no shortcuts in these situations and rebuilding systems is almost always required. It’s better to deprive the criminals of their spoils and build back better,” said Wisniewski.

Additional key findings from the report include:

• In line with a broader, cross-sector trend, the retail sector experienced its highest rate of encryption over the past three years, with 71% of those organisations targeted by ransomware stating that attackers successfully encrypted their data
• The percentage of retail organisations attacked by ransomware declined from 77% last year to 69% this year
• The percentage of retail organisations that recovered in less than a day decreased from 15% to 9% this year, while the percentage of retail organisations that took more than a month to recover increased from 17% to 21%

Sophos recommends the following best practices to help defend against ransomware and other cyberattacks:

• Strengthen defensive shields with:
  • Security tools that defend against the most common attack vectors, including endpoint protection with strong anti-ransomware and anti-exploit capabilities
  • Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) to thwart the abuse of compromised credentials
  • Adaptive technologies that respond automatically to attacks, disrupting adversaries and buying defenders time to respond
  • 24/7 threat detection, investigation and response, whether delivered in-house or by a specialised Managed Detection and Response (MDR) provider

• Optimise attack preparation, including regularly backing up, practicing recovering data from backups and maintaining an up-to-date incident response plan
• Maintain security hygiene, including timely patching and regularly reviewing security tool configurations

To learn more about the State of Ransomware in Retail 2023, download the full report from Sophos.com.

The State of Ransomware 2023 survey polled 3,000 IT/cybersecurity leaders in organisations with between 100 and 5,000 employees, including 355 from the retail sector, across 14 countries in the Americas, EMEA and Asia Pacific.

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Learn More About:

• The State of Ransomware 2023
• Dwindling dwell times and changing attacker behavior and techniques in the Active Adversary Report for Tech Leaders 2023
• Attacker behaviors, techniques and tactics in the 2023 Active Adversary Report for Business Leaders, based on analysis of Sophos incident response cases
• IT and cybersecurity leaders’ top challenges and priorities in The State of Cybersecurity 2023: The Business Impact of Adversaries on Defenders
• Different ransomware threat actors, their TTPs and Sophos’ latest ransomware research in the Ransomware Threat Intelligence Center
• Sophos X-Ops and its groundbreaking threat research by subscribing to the Sophos X-Ops blogs

About Sophos

Sophos is a worldwide leader and innovator of advanced cybersecurity solutions, including Managed Detection and Response (MDR) and incident response services and a broad portfolio of endpoint, network, email, and cloud security technologies that help organisations defeat cyberattacks. As one of the largest pure-play cybersecurity providers, Sophos defends more than 500,000 organisations and more than 100 million users globally from active adversaries, ransomware, phishing, malware, and more. Sophos’ services and products connect through its cloud-based Sophos Central management console and are powered by Sophos X-Ops, the company’s cross-domain threat intelligence unit. Sophos X-Ops intelligence optimises the entire Sophos Adaptive Cybersecurity Ecosystem, which includes a centralised data lake that leverages a rich set of open APIs available to customers, partners, developers, and other cybersecurity and information technology vendors. Sophos provides cybersecurity-as-a-service to organisations needing fully-managed, turnkey security solutions. Customers can also manage their cybersecurity directly with Sophos’ security operations platform or use a hybrid approach by supplementing their in-house teams with Sophos’ services, including threat hunting and remediation. Sophos sells through reseller partners and managed service providers (MSPs) worldwide. Sophos is headquartered in Oxford, U.K. More information is available at www.sophos.com.