12th December, 2023:

Sophos, a global leader in innovating and delivering cybersecurity as a service, today shared findings from its sector survey report, “The State of Ransomware in Retail 2023,” which found that only 26% of retail organizations this past year were able to disrupt a ransomware attack before their data was encrypted. This is a three-year low for the sector—a decline from 34% in 2021 and 28% in 2022—suggesting the sector is increasingly unable to halt ransomware attacks already in progress.

“Retailers are losing ground in the battle against ransomware. Ransomware criminals have been encrypting increasingly greater percentages of their retail victims in the last three years, as evidenced by the steadily declining rate of retailers stopping cybercriminal attacks in progress. Retailers must up their defensive game by setting up security that detects and responds to intrusions earlier in the attack chain,” said Chester Wisniewski, director, global field CTO, Sophos.

In addition, the report found that, for those retail organizations that paid the ransom, their median recovery costs (not including the ransom payment) were four times the recovery costs of those that used backups to recover their data ($3,000,000 versus $750,000).

“Forty-three percent of retail victims paid the ransom according to our survey respondents, yet the median recovery cost to victims who paid the ransom was four times the cost to those who used backups and other recovery methods. There are no shortcuts in these situations and rebuilding systems is almost always required. It’s better to deprive the criminals of their spoils and build back better,” said Wisniewski.

Additional key findings from the report include:

• In line with a broader, cross-sector trend, the retail sector experienced its highest rate of encryption over the past three years, with 71% of those organizations targeted by ransomware stating that attackers successfully encrypted their data
• The percentage of retail organizations attacked by ransomware declined from 77% last year to 69% this year
• The percentage of retail organizations that recovered in less than a day decreased from 15% to 9% this year, while the percentage of retail organizations that took more than a month to recover increased from 17% to 21%

Sophos recommends the following best practices to help defend against ransomware and other cyberattacks:

• Strengthen defensive shields with:
  • Security tools that defend against the most common attack vectors, including endpoint protection with strong anti-ransomware and anti-exploit capabilities
  • Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) to thwart the abuse of compromised credentials
  • Adaptive technologies that respond automatically to attacks, disrupting adversaries and buying defenders time to respond
  • 24/7 threat detection, investigation and response, whether delivered in-house or by a specialized Managed Detection and Response (MDR) provider
• Optimize attack preparation, including regularly backing up, practicing recovering data from backups and maintaining an up-to-date incident response plan
• Maintain security hygiene, including timely patching and regularly reviewing security tool configurations

To learn more about the State of Ransomware in Retail 2023, download the full report from Sophos.com.

The State of Ransomware 2023 survey polled 3,000 IT/cybersecurity leaders in organizations with between 100 and 5,000 employees, including 355 from the retail sector, across 14 countries in the Americas, EMEA and Asia Pacific.

Learn More About

• The State of Ransomware 2023
• Dwindling dwell times and changing attacker behavior and techniques in the Active Adversary Report for Tech Leaders 2023
• Attacker behaviors, techniques and tactics in the 2023 Active Adversary Report for Business Leaders, based on analysis of Sophos incident response cases
• IT and cybersecurity leaders’ top challenges and priorities in The State of Cybersecurity 2023: The Business Impact of Adversaries on Defenders
• Different ransomware threat actors, their TTPs and Sophos’ latest ransomware research in the Ransomware Threat Intelligence Center
• Sophos X-Ops and its groundbreaking threat research by subscribing to the Sophos X-Ops blogs

D V L S Pranathi, Mumbai Uncensored, 3rd January, 2023:

We would’ve heard many people say that robots will soon take over the world as an exaggeration. However, it is not a joke anymore. People usually are under the presumption that robots are reducing the need for human labor, especially when we consider examples like chatbots on amazon or other shopping platforms where these chatbots provide a much more efficient form of customer service by handling tracking packages without any human involvement. People cannot be blamed for having this chain of thought, especially when robots like Sophia, a humanoid robot, are hyped so much across the world.

A study by Eric Dahlin, a sociology professor at Bringham Young University, has proven that there is no need to have a fear of robot intervention. The study has revealed that the rate at which robots are replacing humans is lower than it seems to the human eye and that people are overestimating the extent to which robots are overtaking the workforce.

A recent study published in the journal Socius: Sociological Research for a dynamic world revealed that only 14% of the workforce jobs had been replaced by robots which is barely anything. However, just as the human mind works, people who have experienced a loss of employment due to a robot have managed to exaggerate the entire idea by three times.

Dahlin surveyed close to 2,000 people regarding their opinions of work replacement by robots to better understand the relationship between job loss and bots. 47% of all jobs, according to those who have been replaced by a robot (about 14%), have been taken over. In a similar vein, people who had not personally experienced job displacement nonetheless believed that robots had replaced 29% of jobs.

He also concluded from his research that this fear among humans could be dated back to the early 1800s. He says that the results have stayed consistent throughout all the studies and that robots are not displacing workers. All companies worldwide are trying to integrate robots and the human workforce for a greater and better outcome.

“An everyday example is an autonomous, self-propelled machine roaming the isles and cleaning floors at your local grocery store,” says Dahlin. “This robot cleans the floors while employees clean under shelves or other difficult-to-reach places.” (source SciTech daily)

Another excellent example of this idea, as stated by Dahlin, is the aviation industry in which humans and robots work together. They use robots to paint the wings of airplanes. A robot can complete one coat of paint in 24 minutes, while the same thing would take a few hours if done by a human. Therefore, humans load and unload the paint while the robots paint. Hence, we can conclude that robots are overtaking taking the world but not at the rate exaggerated by us humans, and it is in our hands to decide if this is a boon or a bane.

Tista Karmakar, Mumbai Uncensored, 13th July 2022:

Google parent Alphabet is allegedly planning to slow down the hiring process through 2023 with a memo sent to its employees detailing reasons. The tech corporation has revealed that the global economic crisis is the major reason why they had to take measures to cut down expenses. 

Reportedly, Google CEO Sundar Pichai underscored in the memo, “Like all companies, we’re not immune to economic headwinds…We need to be more entrepreneurial working with greater urgency, sharper focus, and more hunger than we’re shown on sunnier days. In some cases, that means consolidating where investments overlap and streamlining processes.” He also added acknowledging the fact that “the uncertain global economic outlook has been top of mind.” Mr. Pichai also said that the company will be, “slowing the pace of hiring for the rest of the year, while still supporting our most important opportunities.” However, He added some rays of hope by saying that the company will be focused on hiring people in engineering, technical, and other critical roles for the rest of 2022 and 2023. 

Reports say that Alphabet shares have gone down by 21% this year and the company’s growth rate slowed down to 23% in the first quarter from the previous year. Mr. Pichai added even though the company’s dwindling growth rate Google hired approximately 10,000 employees in the second quarter.  The pandemic had an adverse effect on several industries but Google was less struck by the pandemic in the initial years. Google reportedly generated revenue of $189.52 billion in 2020 along with YouTube which also collected profits on ad revenue of over $6.9 billion which is approximately 49% of the increase in the fourth quarter of 2020, the pandemic year. The further impact on the economy came down following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Now, Google is attempting to restructure its economy by absorbing the impact. Recently, Uber has also announced that the company will be “hardcore about costs” while Meta stated to its employees warning them of “serious times” ahead after freezing the hiring process.