Emsisoft reports:
In 2023, the U.S. was once again battered by a barrage of financially-motivated ransomware attacks that denied Americans access to critical services, compromised their personal information, and probably killed some of them.
In total, 2,207 U.S. hospitals, schools and governments were directly impacted by ransomware over the course of the year, with many more being indirectly impacted via attacks on their supply chains. Additionally, thousands of private sector companies were either directly or indirectly impacted.
We believe that the only solution to the ransomware crisis – which is as bad as it has ever been – is to completely ban the payment of ransoms. We’ll discuss why we believe this action is necessary in the next section.
The table below shows the number of organizations which were impacted in each of the last three years.
2021 2022 2023 Hospital systems* 27 25 46 K-12 school districts* 62 45 108 Post-secondary schools 26 44 72 Governments 77 106 95 Totals 192 220 321