The Cryptolocker ransomware known for its dirty encryption deeds may have affected more Brits than previously estimated as a new research puts the number of victims at three percent of the population.
According to a research carried out by Eerke Boiten and Julio Hernandez-Castro at the University’s Interdisciplinary Research Centre for Cyber Security at the University of Kent, 9.7 percent of the respondents were affected by some sort of ransomware and 3.4 percent revealed that they were victims of Cryptolocker.
The research is based on 1,502 respondents out of which 964 answered on a question related to ransomware. The researchers do put in a word of caution about the results, but the numbers do match previous data released by Symantec and Dell SecureWorks.
The infection figures may corroborate, but one thing that surprises us and is way off the charts compared to previous results is the number of victims who ended up paying to get their data back – a whopping 40 percent. Symantec had revealed in its research that just 3 percent of the victims paid up and Dell SecureWorks put the figure at 0.4 percent.
“The findings of this question are quite remarkable and defy previous estimations of prevalence and success by a large margin, sometimes tenfold”, note the researchers in their report.
“If this were true and other researchers’ findings corroborate this figure in the future, it shows a lack of success of the multiple public calls discouraging victims to pay the ransom, and would explain the enormous success of this particular ransomware (from the criminals’ point of view, of course) and why copycats are rapidly emerging”, the researcher duo notes.
