69% of organizations believed they were prepared for a ransomware attack — but after experiencing one, confidence dropped by 20%. Building a resilient response plan is more important than ever.
Ransomware is becoming more advanced and widespread. Organizations must strengthen their data protection and recovery strategies to keep their data secure. How does your organization measure up against these threats?
To assess your readiness, consider the following questions.
Mind the preparedness gap.
Pre-attack confidence doesn’t always match reality. Organizations tended to think they were more prepared before they were struck by an attack.
In fact, 30% of ransomware victims claimed they were either only somewhat prepared, not very prepared or not at all prepared for the attack.
How prepared do you think your organization is if a ransomware attack occurs?
Pre-attack preparations mean options.
Organizations knew they should have a playbook to respond to a ransomware attack — 98% said they did. But less than half of responding organizations had key technical elements in their playbook. One option for a successful response to a ransomware attack is through alternative infrastructure arrangements like cloud backup.
Does your organization have alternative infrastructure arrangements in place — like cloud backup — if you had to respond to a ransomware attack?
Teams must collaborate.
Enhancing collaboration and communication between IT operations and security teams was seen to help organizations increase their cyber resilience.
How much improvement is needed to fully align your organization’s IT operations/backup teams with your cybersecurity teams?
Invest in resilience, not ransoms.
Yet even as collaboration continues to improve, budgets for security and recovery have not kept pace with organizational needs, creating vulnerabilities to new forms of attack. Cyberthreats expand and grow more sophisticated, with extremely costly and disruptive outcomes. It’s more important than ever for organizations to devote enough resources to increasing resilience, fortifying incident response, and supporting recovery.
How has your overall organization’s cybersecurity budget changed for 2025 compared to 2024?
Call the experts.
One way organizations are dealing with ransomware attacks is through the use of negotiators in a third-party specialist agreement.
These third-party negotiators are an assist to organizations because of their experience in dealing with cyber extortionists. They are indispensable in guiding engagement based on experience and understanding of threat actor behavior.