Last year, cybercriminals attacked the California-based Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center, encrypting files crucial in running the hospital’s operating systems and demanding a ransom to restore them to working order. The scam worked – after 10 days of futility, the hospital surrendered and paid $17,000 to regain system control.
Other hospitals, government agencies and businesses in the U.S. and abroad were targeted similarly last year, leading CNET to dub such ransomware scenarios as “the hot hacking trend of 2016.” And the numbers are truly staggering. Osterman Research estimates that nearly half of surveyed organizations have been hit with ransomware within the last year, and concludes that ransomware will amount to a $1 billion source of income for cyber criminals in 2016. In a recent report, Kaspersky Security states that in Q3 2016, a business was attacked by ransomware every 40 seconds, and that even after paying the ransom, one in five of them never got their data back.