Has ransomware become more prevalent or just increasingly publicized?


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Head of Business Technology in Software, 201 - 500 employees
There is a lot of debate about whether the rise of ransomware has happened because of cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrency has been here and the way I see it is, there's honey, so all the flies are coming for it. If there is money, crooks will come out. 51% of the companies hit by ransomware are hit again within 3 months because people noted that they paid and then didn't increase their protection. We need to figure out how to recognize it, how to protect against it and what we can do about it if it happens. But there are costs involved.

For me as a business technology guy, I need to understand where I should put my dollars. There are 30-40 different security applications in an organization. That's too many.
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Chief Information Officer in Education, 5,001 - 10,000 employees
Ransomware is a concern because we have so many accounts and a massive amount of data. In the last 18 months or so, the public sector's been hit quite hard in those spaces because hackers suddenly realized that if you don't have a CISO or a security team, the defenses are down, so they’ll go after those organizations. It makes it really difficult.

I've got 56K students that are all authenticated on the network. They can go down to the public library, get a book on hacking and then come back as pre-authenticated hackers. We've had a denial of service attack by a kid in middle school who didn't quite know what he was doing. So there's an internal focus on those pieces, but school districts have a hard time. They don't have the funds or resources.
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Head of Security in Software, 501 - 1,000 employees
When somebody asks me, "What are you doing about ransomware?" the trouble I have is that ransomware is nothing new. It’s been around for years but recently gained attention because the whole east coast was shut down by the Colonial Pipeline incident. 

As someone coming from a consulting and financial background, ransomware has always been on the table. It’s just that people did not talk about it as much and it was swept under the rug called incident response and management. So if you have an incident response plan, then by extension it was your incident response plan for ransomware. That is how it has been treated until now.
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