Why businesses must reckon with the human cost of ransomware

For all the prominence of ransomware and the chaos left in its wake, most conversations around attacks tend to focus on the financial damage. Companies have blamed ransomware for insolvencies, while the global financial cost of ransomware attacks totals hundreds of billions of pounds. But there is another, less frequently discussed cost: the huge emotional and physical toll on the people left dealing with the aftermath of attacks. Two new reports, The Ransomware Victim Experience from defence thinktank RUSI and an accompanying academic article for the Journal of Cybersecurity, outline just how devastating these attacks are to victims’ health and wellbeing.