Delay responding to email breaches likely to lead to ransomware attacks

A new report shows that organizations taking longer than nine hours to address an email security breach have a 79 percent chance of also being a victim of ransomware.

The study from Barracuda, based on a survey of 2,000 IT decision makers carried out by Vanson Bourne, also finds that most of the organizations surveyed (78 percent) experienced an email breach in the previous 12 months, with the average cost to recover reaching $217,068.

Smaller businesses are hit especially hard. Companies with 50 to 100 employees incur costs of on average $1,946 per person, while larger organizations with 1,000 to 2,000 staff see average costs of $243 per employee.

"Email security is no longer just about stopping spam or mass phishing -- it’s about preventing the first domino from falling in a cyberthreat chain that could end in operational paralysis, data loss, reputational damage and longer-term business impacts,” says Neal Bradbury, chief product officer at Barracuda. “Responding quickly and effectively to email breaches is critical to overall cyber resilience. This can be a challenge for many organizations. The findings show that the ability to detect and neutralize email incidents is often hampered by increasingly complex and evasive attacks, internal skills shortages, a lack of automation, and more. A unified approach to protection centered on a strong integrated security platform is vital.”

Among other findings only 50 percent of organizations detected a breach within an hour. 47 percent say advanced evasion techniques are the main obstacle to rapid incident response, while 44 percent say the lack of automated incident response delays the detection, containment and removal of threats.

You can read more and get the full report on the Barracuda blog.

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