One out of every four companies pays ransomware extortionists. It’s such a common practice that cyber liability insurance often covers such payments, and it’s even tax-deductible in some countries. But those activities have made the problem much worse and emboldened criminals to new heights of creativity. It’s very likely that if we randomly polled companies on their top cybercrime concern, it would be ransomware. Yet, most companies tackle the problem in an outdated way.

“We see two mistakes that people make in regards to ransomware,” says Joshua Stenhouse, Rubrik’s Field CTO for Cyber Resilience. “They focus on parameter security and hope that different layers of protection in their environment will stop any serious breach. They then look at backups as an insurance policy if something goes wrong. But the result is that many are attacked, encrypted and have to pay the ransom.”