1 in 5 SMEs shut down due to ransomwares

Another 11% said they lost revenue.

Small and medium-sized enterprises in Singapore have been a target by ransomware in the past year, with 21% saying they had to cease business operations immediately.

According to Malwarebytes' Second Annual State of Ransomware Report, 11% of businesses affected by ransomware reported revenue losses.

Interestingly, the study revealed that ransom demands are not the biggest problem with ransomware. The biggest concern turns out to be the downtime.

"We found that for 53% of the Singaporean organisations that were infected with ransomware, the ransom demanded was $1,000 or less," the study noted.

Only 7% of ransom demands were in excess of $10,000 and, unlike organisations in the other countries that were surveyed, no ransom demands exceeded $50,000.

"However, our research also found that for 15% of impacted organisations, a ransomware infection caused 25 or more hours of downtime, but no organisations surveyed in Singapore reported that their systems were down for more than 100 hours. Our research found that organisations in Singapore generally suffered about the same levels of downtime as in the other geographies we surveyed," the report said.

Meanwhile, the most common source of ransomware infections in Singaporean organisations were not known. Around 30% were from an unknown source, whilst the next most common source was a malicious link in an email. Singaporean organisations are slightly less likely to know the source of their ransomware infection than the global average of 27%.

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