Mimecast Limited published its “The State of Email Security” report. The report shows enterprises faced unprecedented cybersecurity risk in 2020 from increasing attack volume, the pandemic-driven digital transformation of work, and generally deficient cyber preparedness and training. 

In fact, 79% of respondents indicated their companies had experienced a business disruption, financial loss or other setback in 2020 due to a lack of cyber preparedness. Respondents identified ransomware as the chief culprit behind these disruptions. Other insights include:

• 61% indicated they had been impacted by ransomware in 2020, a 20% increase over the number of companies reporting such disruption in last year’s “The State of Email Security” report.
• Companies impacted by ransomware lost an average of six working days to system downtime, with 37% saying downtime lasted one week or more.
• More than half (52%) of ransomware victims paid threat actor ransom demands, but only two-thirds (66%) of those were able to recover their data. The remaining one-third (34%) never saw their data again, despite paying the ransom.

The report also revealed additional threat trends, including:

• A 64% year-over-year increase in threat volume.
• An increase in email usage in eight out of 10 companies.
• 47% of survey respondents noted they saw an increase in email spoofing activity.
• 71% said they are concerned about the risks posed by archived conversations from collaboration tools.

All of these data points can be attributed to the pandemic: work-from-home increased email and collaboration tool usage, and threat actors sought to capitalize on the new “digital office” with massive waves of COVID-19-related social engineering attacks.

70% of survey respondents believe their business will be harmed by email attacks in the next year. In 2020, 59% of respondents said they felt this way.

The fifth annual “The State of Email Security,” report is based on a global survey of 1,225 information technology and cybersecurity leaders, and supported by Mimecast’s Threat Center data, which screens more than one billion emails per day.