When Every Second Counts: A guide to ransomware remediation for security professionals

According to a survey by Sophos, the average ransom payment has been steadily increasing over the years, reaching around $1.5 million in 2023.1 However, the ransom payment is only a part of the total cost of a successful attack—the same survey found that when you add downtime, labor, device and network costs, lost opportunities, etc., the estimated mean recovery cost was as much as $1.82 million, excluding any ransom paid.

An enterprise data backup and recovery strategy could be an essential foil against data loss. Today, however, backup data is increasingly a target for ransomware, meaning that your last line of defense could become compromised. Many legacy backup systems have an outdated architecture that can make software, servers, and repositories more exploitable to attacks. Furthermore, legacy backup systems typically can’t determine if data has been encrypted, so they may risk backing up the compromised data and unintentionally prolonging the attack.