Sophos, a global leader of innovative security solutions for defeating cyberattacks, released its sixth annual State of Ransomware report, a vendor-agnostic survey of IT and cybersecurity leaders across 17 countries that studies the impact of ransomware attacks on businesses. This year’s survey found that nearly 50% of companies paid the ransom to get their data back – the second highest rate of ransom payment for ransom demands in six years.
Despite the high percentage of companies that paid the ransom, over half (53%) paid less than the original demand. In 71% of cases where the companies paid less, they did so through negotiation, either through their own negotiations or with help from a third party. In fact, while the median ransom demand dropped by a third between 2024 and 2025, the median ransom payment dropped by 50%, illustrating how companies are becoming more successful at minimising the impact of ransomware.
For the third year in a row, exploited vulnerabilities were the number one technical root cause of attacks, while 40% of ransomware victims said adversaries took advantage of a security gap that they were not aware of – highlighting organisations’ ongoing struggle to see and secure their attack surface. Overall, 63% of organisations said resourcing issues were a factor in them falling victim to the attack, with lack of expertise named as the top operational cause in organisations with more than 3,000 people and lack of people/capacity most frequently cited by those with 251-500 employees.
“For many organisations, the chance of being compromised by ransomware actors is just a part of doing business in 2025. The good news is that, thanks to this increased awareness, many companies are arming themselves with resources to limit damage. This includes hiring incident responders who can not only lower ransom payments but also speed up recovery and even stop attacks in progress,” said Chester Wisniewski, Director, Field CISO, Sophos.
Additional key findings from the State of Ransomware 2025 Report:
- Forty-four percent of companies were able to stop the ransomware attack before data was encrypted
- Only 54% of companies used backups to restore their data – the lowest percentage in six years.
- The average cost of recovery dropped from US$2.73 million in 2024, to US$1.53 million in 2025
- State and local government reported paying the highest median amount (US$2.5 million), while healthcare reported the lowest (US$150,000)
- Over half (53%) of organisations fully recovered from a ransomware attack in a week – up from 35% last year
Sophos recommends the following best practices to help organisations defend against ransomware and other cyberattacks:
- Take steps to eliminate common technical and operational root causes of attacks, such as exploited vulnerabilities. Tools like Sophos Managed Risk can help companies access their risk profile and minimise their exposure
- Ensure all endpoints (including servers) are well-defended with dedicated anti-ransomware protection
- Have an incident response plan in place and tested for when things go wrong
- Have good backups and practice restoring data regularly
- Companies need around-the-clock monitoring and detection. If they do not have the resources in-house for this, they can work with a trusted managed detection and response (MDR) provider
