Businesses in Europe are suffering more than their global counterparts according to Datto’s latest European State of the Channel Ransomware Report,
The report said that more than 84 percent of European MSPs reported ransomware attacks against their SME customers –a higher percentage than on all other continents.
Although hackers are turning to banking trojans, cryptomining and other increasingly sophisticated attacks, ransomware is still the number one threat for businesses. Hackers have upped their game by attacking more frequently but demanding less ransom.
The ransomware problem may be bigger. Compared to the global ransomware report results, which found that a quarter of ransomware attacks are reported, only 16 per cent of European victims report such attacks to the authorities.
In the first half of 2018, an alarming 42 percent of MSPs saw their clients suffer multiple attacks in a single day and, again, this is higher than the global average of 35 percent. In addition, ransomware infections in the cloud continue to increase, with 49 percent of cloud-based malware infections targeting Office 365.
The report points out that Ransomware attacks can be crippling for smaller businesses, and the associated system downtime is a problem as it costs European businesses around £26,300 on average. Datto’s latest report found that the cost of this downtime is twelve times greater than the actual cost of ransom requested, exceeding the global average.
However, Datto believes that ransomware attacks may be coming to a crossroads – thanks to savvy businesses mitigating against those threats using business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) and other solutions.
