Sophos’ report, “The State of Ransomware in Critical Infrastructure 2024,” shows that median recovery costs in the Energy and Water sectors have quadrupled to $3 million annually. This figure is four times higher than the global median across sectors. Furthermore, 49% of ransomware attacks on these sectors originated from exploited vulnerabilities.
Data for the State of Ransomware in Critical Infrastructure 2024 report comes from 275 respondents at energy, oil and gas, and utilities organizations, which fall under the Energy and Water sectors of CISA’s 16 defined critical infrastructure sectors. The results for this sector survey report are part of a broader, vendor-agnostic survey of 5,000 cybersecurity/IT leaders conducted between January and February 2024 across 14 countries and 15 industry sectors.
“Criminals focus where they can cause the most pain and disruption so the public will demand quick resolutions, and they hope, ransom payments to restore services more quickly. This makes utilities prime targets for ransomware attacks. Because of the essential functions they provide, modern society demands they recover quickly and with minimal disruption,” said Chester Wisniewski, global Field CTO.
On top of growing recovery costs, the median ransom payment for organizations in these two sectors jumped to more than $2.5 million in 2024—$500,0000 higher than the global cross-sector median. The Energy and Water sectors also reported the second highest rate of ransomware attacks. Overall, 67% of the organizations in these sectors reported being hit by ransomware in 2024, in comparison to the global, cross-sector average of 59%.
Other findings from the report include:
- The energy and water sectors reported increasingly longer recovery times. Only 20% of organizations hit by ransomware were able to recover within a week or less in 2024, compared to 41% in 2023 and 50% in 2022. Fifty-five percent took more than a month to recover, up from 36% in 2023. In comparison, across all sectors, only 35% of companies took more than a month to recover
- These two critical infrastructure sectors reported the highest rate of backup compromise (79%) and the third highest rate of successful encryption (80%) when compared to the other industries surveyed
