The confidence of IT managers and their approach to battling cyberattacks within an organisation change significantly after being attacked by ransomware, according to the “Cybersecurity: The Human Challenge” report by cybersecurity firm Sophos.

The IT managers’ approach to cybersecurity differs depending on whether or not their organisation has been attacked by ransomware, according to the survey report.

Globally, “IT managers at organisations that have been victims of a ransomware attack are nearly one-third and they feel “significantly behind” when it comes to understanding cyber threats as compared to their peers in organisations that were unaffected,” as per the report. 35 per cent of Indian IT managers feel significantly behind when it comes to understanding cyber threats, it said.

There is also a significant increase in focused efforts on preventing cyber threats. Indian IT managers spent 42 per cent of their time focusing on threat prevention.

Organisations that have been attacked by ransomware also feel that their biggest challenge is recruiting and retaining skilled cybersecurity professionals. Globally, over one-third of ransomware victims said that recruiting and retaining skilled IT security professionals was their single biggest challenge when it comes to cybersecurity, compared to 19 per cent of those organizations who hadn’t been hit. In India, the challenge 58 per cent of businesses faced the challenge.

“The difference in resource priorities could indicate that ransomware victims have more incidents to deal with overall. However, it could equally indicate that they are more alert to the complex, multi-stage nature of advanced attacks and therefore put greater resource into detecting and responding to the tell-tale signs that an attack is imminent,” said Chester Wisniewski, a principal research scientist at Sophos.

The report was based on a survey of more than 5000 IT decision-makers globally, with a total of 300 surveyed in India.

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