This report has been prepared using depersonalized data processed by Kaspersky Security Network (KSN). The metrics are based on the number of distinct users of Kaspersky Lab products with the KSN feature enabled, who encountered ransomware at least once in a given period, as well as research into the ransomware threat landscape by Kaspersky Lab experts.

In order to find out more about the challenges and threats businesses are encountering, Kaspersky Lab, together with B2B International, has conducted a study entitled Corporate IT Security Risks Survey 2016. We asked more than 3,000 representatives of small and medium-sized companies how they manage to cope with cryptomalware in the constantly changing landscape of cyber threats.

From The Report, “Evaluation of the business threat landscape can be broken down into two major areas: financial and technical. The former we covered extensively in our previous report, by measuring security budgets and recovery costs from typical threats. The next step is to take a closer look at real incidents that businesses have to deal with, and measures they take to prevent them.”

Drama, intrigue and exploits have plagued 2016 and, as we take stock of some of the more noteworthy stories, we once again cast our gaze forward to glean the shapes of the 2017 threat landscape. Rather than thinly-veiled vendor pitching, we hope to ground these predictions in trends we’ve observed in the course of our research and provide thought-provoking observations for researchers and visitors to the threat intelligence space alike.

From the report, “It’s time for businesses to recalibrate the way they think about their security budgets. Seen as a separate expense to IT infrastructure, it appears hard to justify until disaster strikes. But understood as an essential part of the IT environment – including mobile devices and virtualized machines – its value is obvious, especially in the context of the damage and huge costs it can prevent.”

From the report, “Although real damages can be very different from our average estimation, in this report we’ve made a unique attempt to connect potential risks and real consequences of a security breach, defined in dollars, not gigabytes of data and hours of downtime.”

This report discusses four main findings; 1) Consumers are concerned about online threats to the people and things that matter most, 2) The dangers online can have severe consequences for people’s data, 3) Children are also exposed to online threats, 4) People should be more cyber savvy - and protect what matters most - when they are online.