The IR case data is augmented with telemetry from the Arctic Wolf Aurora Platform and research from our threat intelligence team, digital forensics experts, incident responders, and professional ransomware negotiators. The vast majority of these IR engagements were initiated as part of cyber insurance policies, through our partnerships with insurance providers and privacy law practitioners. While cyber insurance is a valuable risk transfer option for any organization, it’s important to recognize that certain industries are more likely to have coverage than others, and that our sample cases will reflect this distribution.

The 2024 Ransomware Risk Report reveals concerning statistics for business, IT, and security leaders. This report reveals that 74% of victims were attacked not once, but multiple times. Certain countries and industries were more likely to experience subsequent attacks. But overall, more than half the companies we surveyed were successfully breached two or more times — sometimes within the same day.

The 2024 State of the Media: Tech Edition is a subsection of that report, zeroing in on the behaviors and perspectives of journalists and media influencers who cover the technology and engineering industry, a pool of over 500 respondents. We examined their specific challenges and implications for the PR professionals seeking to work with them, as well as the potential opportunities. Our respondents provided candid insights into what they want and need from public relations professionals whose organizations and clients strive to build brand awareness, consumer trust, and thought leadership in the technology and engineering sector.

The results of the surveys affect our product strategy and go-to-market methods, and hopefully help organizations engage in deeper conversations with colleagues and teams as they continually consider modernizations to their data protection and cyber-resiliency strategies. This year’s report surveyed 1,200 respondents — comprised of CISOs (or executives with similar responsibility), security professionals, and backup administrators — whose organizations suffered at least one ransomware attack in 2023 to assess different perspectives in the united fight against ransomware.

The report is based on the findings of an independent, vendor-agnostic survey commissioned by Sophos of 5,000 IT/cybersecurity leaders across 14 countries in the Americas, EMEA, and Asia Pacific. The research reveals that investing in cyber defenses to optimize your insurance position is a double win: organizations report both easier and cheaper access to coverage as well as wider benefits such as improved protection, fewer alerts, and freeing up IT time. This finding further emphasizes the importance of considering cyber risk investments holistically, rather than as individual components.

The fifth Sophos annual study of the real-world ransomware experiences of manufacturing and production organizations around the globe explores the full victim journey, from root cause to severity of attack, financial impact, and recovery time. Fresh new insights combined with learnings from our previous studies reveal the realities facing businesses today and how the impact of ransomware has evolved over the last five years.

This paper explores the benefits of counterfactual analysis for cyber (re)insurers and provides a framework that can help exposure risk managers, actuaries, and catastrophe modelers incorporate it into their standard suite of risk assessment tools. The paper also contains some worked examples of cyber counterfactual analysis that Gallagher Re has conducted in collaboration with CyberCube.

The events of this year have made clear that although blockchains are inherently transparent, the industry has room for improvement in this respect. There are opportunities to connect off-chain data on liabilities with on-chain data to provide better visibility, and transparency of DeFi, where all transactions are on-chain, is a standard that all crypto services should strive to achieve. As more and more value is transferred to the blockchain, all potential risks will become transparent, and we will have more complete visibility.

The goal of the index is simple: We combine on-chain data and real-world data to measure which countries are leading the world in grassroots crypto adoption. Grassroots crypto adoption isn’t about which countries have the highest raw transaction volumes — anyone could probably guess that the biggest, wealthiest countries are far ahead there. Instead, we want to highlight the countries where average, everyday people are embracing crypto the most. To do that, we’ve designed the Global Crypto Adoption Index to identify countries where the most people are putting the greatest share of their wealth into cryptocurrency.

This research aims to equip cloud security professionals, DevOps, DevSecOps, CISOs, and development leaders with valuable insights and practical recommendations for safeguarding their cloud environments, and in doing so, help to secure the cloud for everyone. In some ways, our study confirmed what is already widely known: attackers are constantly scanning the Internet for lucrative opportunities.

In this report, we explore the big names in ransomware, the most frequently targeted sectors, trends in data exfiltration, and which malware and tools are leveraged by ransomware operators. This data creates insights into how organizations can better protect their environments from cyberattacks. The 2023 threat landscape was characterized by a combination of mainstay threat actors and new or reemerging groups. While top variants continue evolving to maintain dominance, the widespread impact of newer groups demonstrates the constant evolution of today’s threats and the need for adaptable defenses and increased cyber resilience.

By leveraging its huge user dataset, Hornet security is uniquely positioned to conduct a detailed examination of email-based threats and distill this into important insights for IT security professionals. Email continues to be an essential communication channel. However, in our analysis of more than 45 billion emails, 36.4% are categorized as “unwanted.” 96.4% of unwanted emails are spam or rejected outright due to external indicators, and just over 3.6% were flagged as malicious.

In this report, CybSafe and The National Security Alliance surveyed over 6,000 people across the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, and New Zealand to get a better understanding of the security behaviors and attitudes. They asked the people about their knowledge of cybersecurity risks, their security best practices, and challenges they face in staying safe online. Cybercriminals know if they want to target an organization, they need to target its people. They believe this report will help organizations to better protect themselves and their people.

This year, we delve deeper into web entities, or content served over HTTP – think websites, web-based control panels, load balancers, and even APIs. Web entities have become a ubiquitous part of our daily lives, enabling us to shop, read the news, and stay in touch with loved ones. Our goal is to share our findings and analysis with the community to provide a deeper understanding of the complexities of the internet. We hope that readers can use these findings to enhance their understanding of the services that comprise the web and make more informed decisions about how to safeguard their digital assets.

This 2023 Ransomware Report presents insights gathered from a survey of 435 cybersecurity professionals, shedding light on organizations’ preparedness and approaches to combating ransomware. The report identifies gaps and obstacles that hinder robust security posture, and outlines strategies for prevention and remediation of ransomware attacks.

As the third annual study of Data Protection Trends, this year’s survey was designed to quantify the shifts in overall concerns/goals and strategies for data protection, as well as gain an understanding of the current market landscape on data protection, disaster recovery, cybersecurity/ransomware and containers.

The survey asked about the impact that ransomware had on their environments, as well as what their IT strategies and data protection initiatives are moving forward. While analysts forecasted growth in overall IT spending for 2023 between 4.5%** by IDC and 5.4%*** by Gartner, respondents in this survey expect their cyber security (preventative) budgets to grow by 5.6% and their data protection (remediation) budgets to grow by 5.5% in 2023.

This is the second annual survey of organizations who suffered cyberattacks with a key focus to compare the viewpoints of four different roles that are involved in cyber-preparedness and/ or mitigation: Security professionals, CISO or other IT executives, IT Operations generalists and backup administrators.

In this data-driven report, based on our scanning of over 200,000 cloud accounts, including more than 30% of the Fortune 100 environments, we analyze the latest industry trends and developments, presenting a factual and data-based assessment of the current state and progression of cloud technology. We examine how the cloud has evolved over the past year and attempt to shed light on some of the complexity of cloud environments, including aspects such as organizational usage of multi-cloud and both managed and non-managed services.

The research revealed that the rate of ransomware attacks has remained level, with 66% of respondents reporting that their organization was hit by ransomware in the previous year, the same as in our 2022 survey. With adversaries now able to consistently execute attacks at scale, ransomware is arguably the biggest cyber risk facing organizations today.

Our international survey explored the experience of ransomware attacks on organizations over the last 12 months. The findings show that almost three-quarters (73%) of respondents report being hit with at least one successful ransomware attack in 2022 — and 38% say they were hit twice or more.