When an attack hits, businesses often face an immediate crisis. In some high-profile cases over the last few years, entire organizations have gone offline overnight, losing access to client records, billing systems, or production lines. Operations grind to a halt, sometimes forcing companies to pay hefty ransoms just to get work done. 

This approach doesn’t guarantee you’ll get your data back, either. Attackers might leak it anyway for fun, sell it, or demand even more money.

Beyond the obvious cost of the ransom itself, you can end up paying for system restorations, professional incident response, and, in some cases, data breach notifications, legal expenses, and potential regulatory fines. It’s not uncommon for large organizations to shell out millions in recovery costs - and that doesn’t even include the potential loss of business in the long term, tied to system downtime during the attack, reputational damage, and more.

For smaller or midsize businesses, the losses could threaten the entire operation.

Over the last few years, some major names across everything from finance and healthcare to government and manufacturing have been taken down by ransomware. In one attack, a global shipping company suffered weeks of disruption after a high-profile infection, causing widespread delivery delays. In another case, a hospital system had to divert ambulances because their digital patient records were encrypted. And that’s just the start. Pretty bleak, right?

Ransomware Leveraging Exploits: Huntress observed LockBit spearheading a major campaign using the ScreenConnect vulnerability (CVE-2024-1709 & CVE-2024-1708) in February 2024. Nearly 88% of all witnessed payloads targeting vulnerable organizations during this campaign were LockBit installers. This specific campaign accounted for 87% of LockBit activity observed by Huntress in 2024, occurring between February 17th and March 1st.

No matter the industry, you can’t ignore the ransomware statistics from the past five years. They clearly show an increase in ransomware attacks across the board, which shouldn’t be surprising given the rising efficiency of cybercriminal groups and the potentially massive paydays. Plus, judging by many ransomware attack statistics from official sources like the FBI and CISA, a big portion of reported cyber incidents involve some form of data encryption. Let’s look at a few statistical facts about ransomware that give more insight into just how bleak things have gotten:

• Ransomware soared from under 1% of all incidents in 2015 to over half of monthly reported events in 2023.

• The number of ransomware attack claims worldwide jumped 74% in 2023 compared to the previous year.

• At least 4,506 ransomware attacks were publicly claimed in 2023 alone. (And who really knows how many were kept private?)

• The FBI reported 2,047 attacks on US businesses in 2019 (20% higher than 2018), growing to 3,729 by 2021—with losses spiking from $8.9M to $49.2M within that same window. After a brief downturn in 2022, ransomware incidents were again on the rise with over 2,825 complaints.

• One study from 2024 suggested a 1 in 10 chance that any given organization would face at least one ransomware incident in the next 12 months, no matter how big or small they are.

• Attackers often target smaller organizations that lack big-time resources. Among $100B+ enterprises, fewer than 10% of incidents were from ransomware, but for businesses under $100M, that figure shot up to 30–40%. 

• In industries like transportation, education, and manufacturing, ransomware made up 80% of recorded cyber losses, with manufacturing alone seeing over half of its incidents involve ransomware.

• Total global losses from ransomware skyrocketed by roughly 140× over the last decade, hitting an estimated $276B from 2019 to 2023.

• A typical ransomware attack costs around $1.4M—nearly 12× more than a non-ransomware incident—and the worst cases can soar to $50M.

• Ransomware claimed about 38% of financial losses from cyber incidents in the last five years, outpacing every other threat in cost.

Ransomware isn’t going anywhere, and attackers show no signs of easing off the throttle. But with the right defenses, you can level the playing field and keep your data out of reach from criminals who don’t care if they destroy your org—because, like mobsters, it’s business, not personal.

So, how do you avoid becoming part of the next wave of ransomware statistics? Along with security essentials like multi-factor authentication and regular updates and patches, protecting your endpoints is a crucial part of the formula

Huntress Managed EDR spots and quarantines malicious processes the second they show up—even if attackers slip past your other defenses. Our 24/7 Security Operations Center (SOC) keeps a constant watch on your endpoints, using tactics like Ransomware Canaries and advanced detection to highlight real risks instead of swamping you with false alerts. And if someone clicks a bad link or an attacker sneaks in through a software flaw, we help you find and squash them before they spread company-wide.

Schedule a demo to see how Huntress Managed EDR can protect your business from the never-ending ransomware onslaught that’s not scaling back anytime soon.