A third of Singapore SMEs hit by ransomware last year: study

A STUDY has found that one in three small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Singapore have experienced a ransomware attack in the last year.

About 21 per cent of those who had been hit by ransomware had to cease all business operations immediately, while 11 per cent lost revenue as a direct result of the attack, according to Malwarebytes' Second Annual State of Ransomware Report released on Tuesday.

The report revealed that more than half of cybercriminals (53 per cent) who strike SMEs in Singapore with ransomware ask for payments of less than US$1,000, with only 7 per cent asking for sums more than US$10,000.

A third of SMEs (33 per cent) who refused to pay the ransom lost access to files as a result. More than 61 per cent of companies in Singapore hit by ransomware experienced downtime of more than nine hours from a single incident of ransomware; the equivalent of a full working day.

SMEs in Singapore ranked ransomware as their top security problem along with malware infiltration through email, with 72 per cent of respondents indicating that they are critical problems. This was followed by email phishing (70 per cent) and malware infiltration via Web browsing (64 per cent).

Despite being a top concern, only one out of 10 (9 per cent) were confident that they would be able to stop ransomware attacks. A third of respondents (30 per cent) that had been affected by ransomware previously indicated they did not know how they were infected.

The multi-country study, which surveyed 1,054 SMEs across Singapore, France, the UK, Germany, Australia and North America, was conducted by Osterman Research.