Ransomware victims are becoming less likely to pay up

Crime is paying less often for threat actors as improved corporate security measures — and dramatically higher ransom demands — sway more companies to reject extortion payments for seized data.

Less than a quarter of 1,800 companies that submitted cyber claims to Marsh, or 23%, paid ransom demands last year, despite a 64% jump in extortion events from 2022 to a record 282, the insurance broker and risk advisor said in a June 11 report.

In 2021, Marsh noted, 63% of its clients paid an extortion demand to protect data.

Companies, especially larger ones, are “just more resilient than they were three, four, five years ago,” Meredith Schnur, managing director of Marsh’s U.S. and Canada cyber practice, told Legal Dive.

Executives overseeing legal, risk, technology and privacy areas have also grown more sophisticated in their approach to mitigating the effects of hacks relative to just five years ago, she said.

When ransomware “initially reared its ugly head,” attacks were “very fast and furious,” Schnur said. “Companies weren’t ready.”

Threat actors locked down and threatened to release stolen data. “And it was very scary,” she said.

Today, a company struck by a ransomware may find that the resiliency measures engineered by its legal, risk, information security and technology departments are suitable to a point that the business isn’t fully impaired. And that can directly affect a company’s decision to pay ransom.

To read the complete article, visit Cybersecurity Dive.