{"id":17130,"date":"2026-08-18T20:27:04","date_gmt":"2026-08-19T03:27:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/?p=17130"},"modified":"2026-08-13T08:15:29","modified_gmt":"2026-08-13T15:15:29","slug":"nearly-half-of-organisations-falling-victim-to-ransomware-encryption-pay-up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/?p=17130","title":{"rendered":"Nearly half of organisations falling victim to ransomware pay up"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Cybersecurity provider <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sophos.com\/en-us\" data-type=\"link\" data-id=\"https:\/\/www.sophos.com\/en-us\">Sophos <\/a>has released a report entitled &#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.sophos.com\/en-us\/content\/state-of-ransomware\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">The State of Ransomware 2026<\/a>,&#8221; with pulled together responses from 2,158 survey participants. It reveals that ransom demands themselves are actually decreasing; but also revealed a shocking 48% of organisations whose data was encrypted paid their attackers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The median ransom payment is now said to be $769,000, down from a neat $1 million from the previous year&#8217;s study, with the median demand dropping to $698,000. Interestingly, 51% of organisations that paid a ransom coughed up less than the demanded amount, which the report says is due to victims &#8220;often [being] successful in negotiating a lower amount than originally demanded.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The lowest category was retail, with a 32% payment rate. 72% of local and state government organisations surveyed paid at least some of the demands. 56% of attacks succeeded in encrypting data, up 11% YOY.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.pcgamer.com\/software\/security\/nearly-half-of-organisations-falling-victim-to-ransomware-encryption-pay-up-says-report-although-half-of-those-often-negotiate-the-payment-down-first\/\" data-type=\"link\" data-id=\"https:\/\/www.pcgamer.com\/software\/security\/nearly-half-of-organisations-falling-victim-to-ransomware-encryption-pay-up-says-report-although-half-of-those-often-negotiate-the-payment-down-first\/\">Article<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Cybersecurity provider Sophos has released a report entitled &#8220;The State of Ransomware 2026,&#8221; with pulled together responses from 2,158 survey participants. It reveals that ransom demands themselves are actually decreasing; but also revealed a shocking 48% of organisations whose data was encrypted paid their attackers. The median ransom payment is now said to be $769,000, down from a neat $1 million from the previous year&#8217;s study, with the median demand dropping to $698,000. Interestingly, 51% of organisations that paid a&#8230;<\/p>\n<p class=\"read-more\"><a class=\"btn btn-default\" href=\"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/?p=17130\"> Read More<span class=\"screen-reader-text\">  Read More<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17130","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cool"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4WECr-4si","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17130","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17130"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17130\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17132,"href":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17130\/revisions\/17132"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17130"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17130"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17130"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}