Build Ransomware Resilience in State and Provincial Government
A six-step suite of tools to build resilience across your organization.
- Ransomware is a high-profile threat that demands immediate attention:
- Sophisticated ransomware attacks are on the rise and evolving quickly.
- Emerging strains can exfiltrate sensitive data, encrypt systems, and destroy backups in only a few hours, which makes recovery a grueling challenge.
- Executives want reassurance but aren't ready to write a blank check. Improvements must be targeted and justified.
Our Advice
Critical Insight
- Resilience is not a trampoline, where you’re down one moment and up the next. It’s more like climbing a mountain. It takes time, planning, and help from people around you to work through challenges.
- Focus on what is in your organization’s control and cultivate strengths that allow you to protect assets, detect incursions, respond effectively, and recovery quickly.
- Malicious agents design progressive, disruptive attacks to pressure organizations to pay a ransom.
- Organizations misunderstand ransomware risk scenarios, which obscures the likelihood and impact of an attack.
- Conventional approaches focus on response and recovery, which do nothing to prevent an attack and are often ineffective against sophisticated attacks.
Impact and Result
To prevent a ransomware attack:
- Conduct a thorough assessment of your current state, identify potential gaps, and assess the possible outcomes of an attack.
- Analyze attack vectors and prioritize controls that prevent ransomware attacks and implement ransomware protection and detection to reduce your attack surface.
- Visualize, plan, and practice your response and recovery to reduce the potential impact of an attack.
Build Ransomware Resilience in State and Provincial Government
A six-step suite of tools to build resilience across your organization.
Analyst Perspective
Ransomware attacks are on the rise and quickly evolving.
The future of global security and prosperity rests on digital foundations. The challenge is to build a flourishing digital society that is resilient to cyberthreats and equipped with knowledge and capabilities to maximize opportunities and manage risks.
With increasing online and data usage, government databases have positioned themselves as major targets for hackers and acts of cyber warfare.
This client advisory is a companion to Info-Tech’s Build Resilience Against Ransomware Attacks blueprint. It provides a deeper look into the challenges that state and provincial governments face when combatting increasingly frequent and devastating ransomware attacks, and it offers a six-step suite of tools to help build resilience across your organization.
Neal Rosenblatt
Principal Research Director
Info-Tech Research Group
Executive Summary
Your ChallengeRansomware is a high-profile threat that demands immediate attention:
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Common ObstaclesRansomware is more complex than other security threats:
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Info-Tech's ApproachTo prevent a ransomware attack:
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Info-Tech Insight
Resilience is not a trampoline, where you’re down one moment and up the next. It’s more like climbing a mountain. It takes time, planning, and help from people around you to work through challenges. Focus on what your organization can control and cultivate strengths that allow you to protect assets, detect incursions, respond effectively, and recover quickly.
Ransomware attacks are on the rise and evolving quickly
“The future of global security and prosperity rests on digital foundations. The challenge is to build a flourishing digital society that is resilient to cyber threats and equipped with knowledge and capabilities to maximize opportunities and manage risks.”
– World Bank, 2023
Ransomware has continued its upward trend, with a more than twofold increase since 2020 (World Bank).
“Blocking the four key paths [credentials, phishing, exploiting vulnerabilities, and botnets] helps to block the most common routes ransomware uses to invade your network.”
– Verizon, 2022
Ransomware attack trends
Annual number of ransomware attacks worldwide, 2017-2021
* Calculated assuming 17% ransomware incident response from IBM’s “X-Force Threat Intelligence Index,” 2023, and the total number of ransomware attacks from SonicWall’s “2022 Cyber Threat Report.”
At-a-glance
Worldwide impact of all cyberattacks
3.67B |
Total estimated number of cyberattack incidents, 2022* |
10.5M |
Number of records lost or stolen every day |
438K |
Number of records lost or stolen every hour |
$5.2T |
Estimated cost of cyberattacks, 2022 |
$10.5T |
Estimated cost of cyberattacks by 2025 |
Cyberattacks hit the Asia-Pacific region hardest
The Asia-Pacific region holds the top spot as the most attacked region in 2022, accounting for 31% of incident response. Europe followed closely behind with 28% of attacks and North America saw 25%. Asia-Pacific and Europe saw higher proportions of cases, increasing 5 percentage points and 4 percentage points respectively from 2021 figures, with a significant drop in the Middle East from 14% to 4%.
Japan accounted for 91% of Asia-Pacific cases, the Philippines 5%, and Australia, India, and Vietnam each at 1.5%.
Manufacturing tops the list of attacked industries in this region, at 48%, followed by finance and insurance at 18%.
Geographic trends
Cyberattack incidents by global region, 2020-2022
Source: “X-Force Threat Intelligence Index,” IBM Security, 2023.
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