A third of mid-market firms were whacked by hacker outages in 2021
New research has revealed that one in three mid-market firms suffered from a hacker induced outage in 2021.
According to a report by cyber firm Censornet, one in five companies were forced to pay hackers to deactivate ransomware, with the average pay-out hitting £144,000, and seven per cent handing out more than £500,000.
“For the UK mid-market, the cybersecurity situation is serious”, said Ed Macnair, chief exec at Censornet. “The financial and reputational cost of cybercrime is rising, putting more pressure on overwhelmed professionals, who are tackling hundreds of alerts a day from siloed point products.”
Gathering insights from 200 UK-based IT and security companies, covering ten different industries in both the public and private sectors, Censornet suggested that vulnerabilities were worsened as more workers worked from home.
Over half of firms said they had not purchased cybersecurity products designed to specifically protect against threats for hybrid and remote workers