PRESS: Russian firms pay more ransom to hackers in 2021

MOSCOW, Nov 9 (PRIME) -- Russian companies paid ransom to cybercriminals for deciphering the data that became unavailable after target attacks more often in 2021 than a year earlier, business daily Kommersant reported on Tuesday, quoting IT firm Positive Technologies.

Positive Technologies polled 250 information security specialists from the firms from different industries and concluded that 16% paid ransom to hackers in comparison to none in 2019.

The experts said that a third of the polled companies faced target attacks in 2021 with the focus on the financial sector, fuel and power companies, and state agencies.

Businesses started paying ransom for decoding data since the number of encoders – software programs that get into a computer and encode valuable files – soared. That started in 2020.

The amount of the ransom can vary from tens of thousands to tens of millions rubles depending on the scale of a company, the daily said.

According to Group-IB, the number of ransomware attacks on the country’s companies has jumped by more than 200% in 2021. Kaspersky counted that encoders attacked 9,200 corporate users in Russia in January–July.

(71.3975 rubles – U.S. $1)

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