Retail industry suffers as ransomware attacks rise by 75%

Retail industry has suffered hugely from cyber attacks, with the sector seeing a 75 per cent rise in malware attacks since the beginning of the year.

According to Sophos, a cybersecurity firm, in its ‘State of Ransomware in Retail 2022,’ report, the firm found that retail had the second highest rate of ransomware attacks last year of all sectors surveyed after the media, leisure, and entertainment industry.

It disclosed that globally, 77 per cent of retail organisations surveyed were hit—a 75 per cent increase from 2020.  This is also 11 per cent more than the cross-sector average attack rate of 66 per cent.

Principal Research Scientist, Sophos, Chester Wisniewski, said, “Retailers continue to suffer one of the highest rates of ransomware attacks of any industry. With more than three in four suffering an attack in 2021, it certainly brings a ransomware incident into the category of when, not if. In Sophos’ experience, the organisations that are successfully defending against these attacks are not just using layered defenses, they are augmenting security with humans trained to monitor for breaches and actively hunting down threats that bypass the perimeter before they can detonate into even bigger problems.

“This year’s survey shows that only 28 per cent of retail organisations targeted were able to stop their data from being encrypted, suggesting that a large portion of the industry needs to improve their security posture with the right tools and appropriately trained security experts to help manage their efforts.”

As the percentage of retail organisations attacked by ransomware increased, so did the average ransom payment. In 2021, the average ransom payment was $226,044, a 53 per cent increase when compared to 2020 ($147,811). However, this was less than one-third the cross-sector average ($812,000).

“It’s likely that different threat groups are hitting different industries. Some of the low-skill ransomware groups ask for $50,000 to $200,000 in ransom payments, whereas the larger, more sophisticated attackers with increased visibility demand $1 million or more,” said Wisniewski. “With Initial Access Brokers (IABs) and Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS), it’s unfortunately easy for bottom-rung cybercriminals to buy network access and a ransomware kit to launch an attack without much effort. Individual retail stores and small chains are more likely to be targeted by these smaller opportunistic attackers,” said Wisniewski.

The report further revealed that while the retail sector was the second most targeted industry, the perceived increase in the volume and complexity of cyberattacks against the industry were slightly below the cross-sector average (55 per cent and 55 per cent respectively).

According to it, 92 per cent of retail organisations hit by ransomware said the attack impacted their ability to operate and 89 per cent said the attack caused their organisation to lose business/revenue

In 2021, the overall cost to retail organisations to remediate a ransomware attack was $1.27 million, down from $1.97 million in 2020

When compared to 2020, the amount of data recovered after paying the ransom decreased (from 67 per cent to 62 per cent), as did the percentage of retail organisations that got all their data back (from nine per cent to five per cent).

In the light of the survey findings, Sophos experts recommended organizations across all sectors follow best practices including, install and maintain high-quality defenses across all points in the environment, review security controls regularly and make sure they continue to meet the organization’s needs; proactively hunt for threats to identify and stop adversaries before they can execute attacks – if the team lacks the time or skills to do this in-house, outsource to a Managed Detection and Response (MDR) team; harden the IT environment by searching for and closing key security gaps: unpatched devices, unprotected machines and open RDP ports, for example. Extended Detection and Response (XDR) solutions are ideal for this purpose.

Others are prepare for the worst, and have an updated plan in place of a worst-case incident scenario and make backups, and practice restoring them to ensure minimal disruption and recovery time

The State of Ransomware in Retail 2022 survey polled 5,600 IT professionals in mid-sized organizations across 31 countries, including 422 respondents from the retail sector.