Ransomware victims who opt to pay their attackers for the promise of a decryption key forked over, on average, $6,733 during the fourth quarter of 2018, up 13 percent from the previous quarter, reports ransomware incident response firm Coveware. However, Coveware cautions that not all payments resulted in victims receiving a decryption key or successfully decrypting data. Most security experts and police recommend that ransomware victims never pay, warning that doing so directly funds cyber crime and further ransomware research and development. Some victims also get targeted again by the same attacker. Coveware’s report also reinforces the importance of disconnecting backups from systems once the backup process is complete, as modern ransomware has the ability to encrypt not just a system, but anything connected to it. In fact, Coveware says that 75 percent of ransomware victims who paid a ransom in late 2018 had also lost their backups to the attack, up from 54 percent the prior quarter. Read the article at Bank Info Security.