The Confidence of IT Managers and Approach to Battling Cyberattacks is Vastly Different Between Those Who’ve Been Impacted by Ransomware and Those who Have Not, Survey Shows.

New Ryuk Ransomware Techniques Underscore How Fast Attackers Switch Gears

OXFORD, U.K. — October 14, 2020 —

Sophos, a global leader in next-generation cybersecurity, today announced the findings of its global survey, “Cybersecurity: The Human Challenge”, which reveals that organizations are never the same after being hit by ransomware. In particular, the confidence of IT managers and their approach to battling cyberattacks differ significantly depending on whether or not their organization has been attacked by ransomware.

For instance, IT managers at organizations hit by ransomware are nearly three times as likely to feel “significantly behind” when it comes to understanding cyberthreats, compared to their peers in organizations that were unaffected (17% versus 6%).

More than one third (35%) of ransomware victims said that recruiting and retaining skilled IT security professionals was their single biggest challengewhen it comes to cybersecurity, compared with just 19% of those who hadn’t been hit. 

When it comes to security focus, the survey found that ransomware victims spend proportionally less time on threat prevention (42.6%) and more time on response (27%) compared to those who haven’t been hit (49% and 22% respectively), diverting resources towards dealing with incidents rather than stopping them in the first place.

“The difference in resource priorities could indicate that ransomware victims have more incidents to deal with overall. However, it could equally indicate that they are more alert to the complex, multi-stage nature of advanced attacks and therefore put greater resource into detecting and responding to the tell-tale signs that an attack is imminent,” said Chester Wisniewski, principal research scientist at Sophos.

The fact that ransomware attackers continue to evolve their tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs) contributes to pressure on IT security teams, as evidenced by SophosLabs Uncut’s article, “Inside a New Ryuk Ransomware Attack”. The article deconstructs a recent attack involving Ryuk ransomware. Sophos incident responders found that the Ryuk attackers used updated versions of widely available and legitimate tools to compromise a targeted network and deploy ransomware. Unusually, the attack progressed at great speed – within three and a half hours of an employee opening a malicious phishing email attachment, the attackers were already actively conducting network reconnaissance. Within 24 hours, the attackers had access to a domain controller and were preparing to launch Ryuk.

“Our investigation of the recent Ryuk ransomware attack highlights what defenders are up against.  IT security teams need to be on full alert 24 hours a day, seven days a week and have a full grasp of the latest threat intelligence on attacker tools and behaviors. The survey findings illustrate clearly the impact of these near-impossible demands. Among other things, those hit by ransomware were found to have severely undermined confidence in their own cyberthreat awareness. However, their ransomware experiences also appear to have given them a greater appreciation of the importance of skilled cybersecurity professionals, as well as a sense of urgency about introducing human-led threat hunting to better understand and identify the latest attacker behavior,” said Wisniewski. “Whatever the reasons, it is clear that when it comes to security, an organization is never the same again after being hit by ransomware.”

The full report, “Inside a New Ryuk Ransomware Attack”, is available on SophosLabs Uncut, where Sophos researchers regularly publish their latest research and breakthrough findings, such as Maze leveraging Ragnar Locker. Threat researchers can follow SophosLabs Uncut in real time on Twitter at @SophosLabs.

 

About the Survey

 

The “Cybersecurity: The Human Challenge” survey was conducted by Vanson Bourne, an independent specialist in market research, in January and February 2020. The survey interviewed 5,000 IT decision makers in 26 countries, in the US, Canada, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, France, Germany, the UK, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Sweden, Poland, the Czech Republic, Turkey, India, Nigeria, South Africa, Australia, China, Japan, Singapore, Malaysia, Philippines and UAE. All respondents were from organizations with between 100 and 5,000 employees.

About Sophos

Sophos is a global leader and innovator of advanced security solutions for defeating cyberattacks, including Managed Detection and Response (MDR) and incident response services and a broad portfolio of endpoint, network, email, and cloud security technologies. As one of the largest pure-play cybersecurity providers, Sophos defends more than 600,000 organizations and more than 100 million users worldwide from active adversaries, ransomware, phishing, malware, and more. Sophos’ services and products connect through the Sophos Central management console and are powered by Sophos X-Ops, the company’s cross-domain threat intelligence unit. Sophos X-Ops intelligence optimizes the entire Sophos Adaptive Cybersecurity Ecosystem, which includes a centralized data lake that leverages a rich set of open APIs available to customers, partners, developers, and other cybersecurity and information technology vendors. Sophos provides cybersecurity-as-a-service to organizations needing fully managed security solutions. Customers can also manage their cybersecurity directly with Sophos’ security operations platform or use a hybrid approach by supplementing their in-house teams with Sophos’ services, including threat hunting and remediation. Sophos sells through reseller partners and managed service providers (MSPs) worldwide. Sophos is headquartered in Oxford, U.K. More information is available at www.sophos.com.