Emsisoft, a security company has released a report on the total number of ransomware attacks that happened against US organizations last year. And the numbers are fairly worrisome.
According to it, over 2,300 public and private organizations in the US have been hit in 2021. These include local government offices, schools, and healthcare organizations. Among them, about 118 incidents have been seen leaking the senstive data of people resulting in data breaches.
Ransomware Attacks in 2021
Over the years, ransomware actors have grown with sophisticated tools to hit high targets and earn lucrative deals. And in the last couple of years, this activity has grown sharply due to lockdowns and work-from-home concepts. Now, it’s not better either.
As per Emsisoft, ransomware groups have attacked over 2,300 organizations in the US in 2021. The detailed report notes 1,043 schools, 77 state and municipal governments, and 1,203 healthcare providers. And in them, about 118 incidents led to data breaches, leaking the senstive data of people.
Talking on this more, Emsisoft said the number of government hits has considerably down when compared to the previous year, where 119 attacks were recorded in 2020, vs 77 in 2021. In terms of educational institutions, about 62 school districts and 26 colleges or universities were impacted.
Here, it’s a slight reduction when compared to 2020s reported incidents of 84 attacks. Well, about half of them have resulted in leaking data of both students and employees, said researchers.
And finally, in terms of healthcare organizations, there were ransomware attacks made against 1,203 individual healthcare sites in 2021, compared to 2020s 560 individual sites.
Overall, Emsisoft estimated the losses in 2021 from about 77 incidents had amounted to $623.7 million, based on reports from Winnebago County, Illinois CIO Gus Genter’s past data, which in 2019 estimated that an average ransomware incident costs $8.1 million and requires 287 days to recover.
