Security researchers from Comparitech have determined just how costly ransomware attacks can be for public entities. The team tracked 1,133 confirmed ransomware attacks on government agencies between 2018 and 2024 and analyzed the data. They found that on average, a ransomware attack on a government entity resulted in nearly a month of downtime — 27.8 days, to be exact.
And that downtime doesn’t come cheap. The average cost of each day an agency was out of commission due to a ransomware attack was $83,600. They estimate that downtime alone for all the tracked attacks cost public-sector entities roughly $2.2 billion.
Comparitech also found that while government entities typically take longer to recover from ransomware attacks, this downtime doesn’t cost them as much as other sectors. Health-care companies suffer an average of 16 days of downtime from ransomware attacks, but each of those days costs them about $900,000. And while manufacturers average just 12 days of downtime, each one costs them about $1.9 million.
