Despite increased awareness among organizations about cybersecurity, ransomware attacks are going up. Cyber extortionists are targeting organizations and governments with impunity, holding their data hostage and demanding ransom in the range of millions of dollars.
Such is the severity that global ransomware damages are expected to cross $30 billion by 2023. And as per the latest Cost of a Data Breach Report by IBM, data breach costs have surged 13% from 2020 to 2022, with the average data breach cost reaching a record high in 2022 at $4.35 million USD.
To help you learn more about ransomware attacks—how they happen, what they look like, and how (or whether) companies are able to recover afterwards, here is a survey of some recent examples of real-life ransomware attacks.
Keep all software, including operating systems and applications, up to date and patched to reduce the risk of vulnerabilities.
Steve Tcherchian
CISO, Chief Product Officer
XYPRO Technologies
4 cautionary examples of ransomware attacks
Ransomware attacks can come in many types, shapes, and sizes—and they can target just about anybody, from a single individual to the largest corporations. (Of course, the bigger the company, the more money the criminals are able to try extorting.) Some of the biggest and most high-profile ransomware attacks in recent memory have been the attacks on Colonial Pipeline, Travelex, Nvidia, and the government of Costa Rica.