SOPHOS, a cybersecurity company, has published a new sectoral survey report, "The State of Ransomware in Financial Services 2022." The State of Ransomware in Financial survey polled of 5,600 IT professionals in mid-sized organizations across 31 countries, including 444 respondents from the financial services sector.
According to the company, the findings reveal an increase of 62 per cent in ransomware attacks on the organisations surveyed in this sector, 64 per cent reported an increase in attack complexity and 55 per cent reported an increase in the impact of attacks.
Despite the jump in the financial services ransomware attack rate, Sophos said the sector actually reported the lowest rate across all sectors surveyed.
When compared to other sectors, Sophos said the financial services organisations showed some of the highest resilience despite the rise in ransomware attacks with:
- Only 54 per cent reported that attackers successfully encrypted their data, compared to the global average of 65 per cent across all sectors.
- Ten per cent were able to get the entirety of their data back after encryption, compared with 4 per cent across all sectors.
- Sixty-two per cent were able to recover from an attack in just a week, compared with the global average of 53 per cent across all sectors.
"This suggests that the financial services sector has developed strong layered defenses against ransomware attacks with 83 per cent of the organisations in the financial services sector stating they had secured cyber insurance coverage," said Sophos.