Healthcare Pays More Ransom Demands, But Get Less Data Back

According to a new Sophos report, State of Ransomware in Healthcare 2022, twice as many healthcare organizations paid the ransom in 2021 vs 2020. Though they paid the ransom, only 2% got all of their data back. Interviews with 381 it enterprises in 31 countries revealed the following:

• Ransomware attacks on healthcare almost doubled – 66% of healthcare organizations surveyed were hit by ransomware in 2021, up from 34% in 2020
• Healthcare is most likely to pay the ransom, ranking first with 61% of organizations paying the ransom to get encrypted data back, compared with the global average of 46%; this is almost double than 34% who paid the ransom in 2020
• Healthcare pays the least ransom amount – US$197K was the ransom amount paid by healthcare in 2021 compared with the global average of US$812K
• Less data is recovered after paying the ransom – healthcare organizations that paid the ransom got back only 65% of their data in 2021, down from 69% in 2020; furthermore, only 2% of those that paid the ransom in 2021 got ALL their data back, down from 8% in 2020
• High incident cost – healthcare ranked second highest at US$1.85M in terms of the average cost to rectify ransomware attacks compared with the global average of US $1.40M
• Long recovery time from ransomware attacks – 44% of healthcare organizations that suffered an attack in the last year took up to a week to recover from the most significant attack, whereas 25% of them took up to one month
• Low cyber insurance coverage in healthcare – only 78% of healthcare organizations have cyber insurance coverage compared with the global average of 83%
• Cyber insurance driving better cyber defenses – 97% of healthcare organizations with cyber insurance have upgraded their cyber defenses to improve their cyber insurance position
• Cyber insurance almost always pays out – in 97% of incidents where the healthcare organization had cyber insurance that covered ransomware, the insurer paid some or all the costs incurred (with 47% overall covering the ransom payment)