31% of US companies are forced to close down after a ransomware attack

Ransomware has become a big deal with the recent attack on the US by a Russian-linked hacking group that was carried out on July 4.

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Atlas VPN, a free VPN app, has posted an update to its blog where it states that with data it has acquired, "31% of businesses in the US are forced to close down as a consequence of falling victim to ransomware attacks." For those that don't know, ransomware is a form of malware where an individual threatens to publish personal data of a victim that is then forced into paying the individual, either for access to the data or for it not to be published.

Atlas VPN states that the data provided here has been sourced from Cybereason, who surveyed 1,263 cybersecurity professionals in April 2021. Of those 1,263 cybersecurity professionals, it was found that companies between 500+ employees were most likely to fall victim to ransomware (30%), followed by companies with 250-500 employees (23%), "100-249 employees (25%), 50-99 employees (11%), 10-49 employees (10%), and fewer than 10 people (1%)."

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