A new survey has found that Irish businesses are increasingly being successfully targeted by ransomware.
As many as a fifth of companies here may have fallen victim to the cyber threat in the past year, it found.
Ransomware is a form of computer virus that involves a device being infected with a virus that locks the machine until such time as a ransom is paid.
The recent WananCry attack saw hundreds of thousands of machines around the world infected with the malware.
Although the survey of IT professionals and decision makers, carried out by TechPro on behalf of Ward Solutions, used a limited sample of 170 firms, it does show the potential scale of the increasing threat.
More than half of the organisations said more generally that the number of security incidents impacting them in the past year had increased.
64% of those whose businesses had fallen victim to ransomware said the amount demanded by the fraudsters to unlock the machine or machines was under €1,000.
But only 14% said they would pay the ransom if the data was so valuable as to warrant it.
Nearly half said they would not pay, not matter how much the data was worth.
Regulations around data protection are set to tighten next year and will include mandatory reporting requirements.
But right now only half of those surveyed said they would tell third parties impacted by a breach, with three quarters saying they would inform the authorities.
