To say ransomware’s a big threat would be the understatement of the year, and we’re less than a week into 2022. A new report by Cybersecurity Insiders and Forcepoint’s recently acquired Bitglass finds that a majority (55%) of cybersecurity professionals view malware and ransomware as an “extreme” threat, and over the next 12 months 75% of respondents believe it will become an even bigger threat to their organizations.

More than half of respondents believe that an attack is very (31%) to extremely (23%) likely to happen in the next year. Another 29% said they are moderately likely to get hit.

Additionally, a majority of respondents (63%) are only moderately confident in their ability to detect and block malware and ransomware before it spreads to critical systems.

But this doesn’t mean that IT and security teams are burying their collective heads in the sand. The report also looks at how enterprises plan to tackle future attacks — and what they aren’t doing but should be.

The 2021 Malware and Ransomware report, based on a fall 2021 online survey of 236 cybersecurity professionals, found that criminals continue using tried-and-true methods to get ransomware into organizations: phishing emails (61%), email attachments (47%), and user visiting malicious websites (39%).

“Interestingly, 49% of respondents shared that the biggest obstacle to improving malware and ransomware defense in their organization is the evolving sophistication of attacks,” Forcepoint spokesperson Woody Mosqueda wrote in a blog post. “This suggests that there is a perception that ransomware and malware attacks are becoming more sophisticated, when in fact cybercriminals are leveraging the same tactics they have been employing for years.”

The report also looks at how ransomware attacks hurt business and a company’s bottom line.

Of those that fell victim to a ransomware attack over the past 12 months, 52% said they suffered from productivity loss, 38% said they experienced system downtime, and 27% lost revenue. Another 17% reported negative press and bad publicity as a business impact of ransomware, while 15% said they suffered damage to company reputation.

To address this threat, 50% of organizations say they plan to increase security spending and 40% plan to change their IT security strategy. About two-thirds (66%) said they expect their organization’s ransomware security budget to increase.

Currently, most security teams (82%) said they rely on anti-malware and endpoint security tools to detect ransomware. Another 60% said they predominantly use email and web gateways, while 47% use intrusion detection systems, and 41% monitor network behavior.

When asked how they protect against ransomware, only 29% of security teams said they have implemented a zero-trust architecture. The largest percentage (55%) said they do this by backing up critical data and assets, and 7% have purchased cybersecurity insurance.

However, another recent Dell’Oro Group report indicates that enterprises are spending more on zero-trust enabling technologies in response to ransomware threats.

“Interest in zero trust has exploded due to the numerous high-profile security attacks in the recent past that have shown the inadequacy of the legacy perimeter network architecture, particularly for the remote-user use case,” Mauricio Sanchez, research director of network security at Dell’Oro Group, told SDxCentral in an email.

Security practitioners agree that identity and access management technologies are a good place for organizations to start when implementing a zero-trust security strategy.

Zero trust and identity becomes increasingly important in the new “work-from-anywhere” environment, which massively expanded companies’ threat landscape.

“Always, the first thing I say is: use MFA for 100% of your users, 100% of the time,” Ann Johnson, who leads Microsoft’s security business, told SDxCentral in an earlier interview. “It is the first thing you should be doing for security posture that will help decrease your risk.”