No leading questions, as usual, we didn’t conduct the survey ourselves, to avoid the problem that a cybersecurity company asking respondents cybersecurity questions might be considered “leading the witnesses”.
Surveys overtly connected with vendors often result in answers, like the curate’s remark about the egg, that the respondents thought the experts might like to hear, rather than the bald facts of what really happened.
We also made an effort to keep our sample size high, and to talk to a broad and representative cross-section of the global business community.
We therefore used a survey company to conduct the process, and they asked numerous cybersecurity questions to more than 5500 randomly-chosen respondents from a wide range of businesses of varying sizes in more than 30 countries across the globe.
As with the Curate’s Egg, you’ll find that some parts of the report are indeed very good, but it’s hard to sugar-coat the headline statistic of this year’s survey, which is disappointing.
In our Ransomware 2020 survey, 1/2 of our respondents said that they’d actually had a ransomware infection in the past year (2019).
In our Survey 2021, we were pleased to report that figure was down to about 1/3, with a creditable 63% of respondents saying they’d avoided ransomware altogether during 2020.
But in the Ransomware 2022 survey, the figure has gone up again, with 2/3 of our respondents admitting to a ransomware infection during 2021.
In other words, the underlying prevalence of ransomware attacks has doubled since our previous report, which implies that the size, scale and skills (if we may use that word in this context) of the cybercriminal underworld have increased correspondingly, too.
