One fifth of Irish firms ‘would pay €50,000 ransom’ to online criminals

Almost one-fifth of Irish businesses would pay a ransom of up to €50,000 to cyber criminals, a survey has found. The survey by IT firm DataSolutions found almost a third of senior IT professionals didn’t think their companies were equipped to deal with emerging cybersecurity threats.

Almost a fifth said their organisations had been attacked online in the past year, while almost half said their security was outdated. More than 110 senior IT professionals with mostly larger companies were surveyed.

Three-quarters of Irish firms upped cybersecurity after WannaCry, the survey found. WannaCry affected 230,000 computers globally in May, including the UK’s National Health Service and Spain’s Telefonica, while companies were hit by ransom demands. Files on infected computers were encrypted and a ransom was demanded to release the files back to the owner.