Average cost of retail ransomware attack recovery rises to $1.76M
The monetary expense of ransomware incidents for retailers is climbing, but not all industry ransomware trends are bad.
The average (mean) cost for retailers to recover from a ransomware attack, excluding any ransom paid, rose year-over-year to $1.76 million from $1.65 million, according to the sixth annual Sophos State of Ransomware in Retail report.
On the positive side, the average time for retail IT and cybersecurity executives surveyed by Sophos to fully recover from a ransomware attack fell to 2.54 weeks from 3.16 weeks the previous year. More than half (56%) recovered within a week, the highest share in five years of Sophos collecting retail data.
Causes
Respondents indicated that phishing was the top technical root cause of ransomware attacks they suffered at 29%, followed by exploited vulnerabilities (26%) and malicious email (22%). Identity-based vectors, including malicious email, phishing, compromised credentials, and brute force attacks, initiated 69% of ransomware attacks against retail.
[READ MORE: Ransomware attacks jump 29% to hit new quarterly high in Q3]
Two-in-three (66%) respondents said their ransomware attack was also their most significant identity attack. Close to four-in-10 (38%) attributed their breach to a known security gap, a weakness they were aware of but had not addressed. That was the most common operational root cause among respondents.
Attack success rates
More than six-in-10 (62%) of ransomware attacks on retail succeeded in encrypting data, up from 48% in 2025. Attacks that encrypted data and also stole it rose to 19%, up from 14% the prior year.
Recovery
Seven-in-10 (71%) respondents restored data from backups, up from 62% the prior year. Far fewer retailers paid the ransom to get their data back than in 2025, with an average recovery rate of 2.54 weeks.
Almost all retail victims of credential-based attacks had multi-factor authenication enabled (97%), yet more than half still had data encrypted by attackers. Firewalls flagged 59% of attacks before the ransomware deployed, but even with early indicators, victims were encrypted 60% of the time.
Sophos surveyed 217 IT and cybersecurity executives in retail organizations that were hit by ransomware in the last 12 months from January to March 2026.
