Ransomware attacks hit record level in UK, according to neglected official data

The true count of ransomware incidents is a known unknown for officials trying to figure out how to tackle the problem. Victims are not obliged to report attacks to law enforcement, and darknet extortion sites only provide a partial count of victims who refused to pay. Despite frustrations around what the true figure is, few people seem to be aware of the ICO’s security incident trends data, which records the number of ransomware incidents reported to the data protection regulator. Recorded Future News was unable to find any instances of this data being publicly cited by officials in British government departments. Jamie MacColl, a research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), said he was “surprised that this dataset exists publicly and that it’s not more widely used in cyber policy discussions about ransomware attacks in the UK, particularly given it’s been available for two years.”