Economy

Kaspersky, VDC Research reveal over $18B in potential losses from ransomware attacks

  • On global manufacturing industry in 2025

Kaspersky in collaboration with VDC Research announced that in the first three quarters of 2025 ransomware attacks on manufacturing organisations could have generated over $18 billion in losses.

This figure reflects just the direct cost of an idle workforce during downtime, with overall operational and financial impacts far exceeding this amount.

Estimations were made across APAC, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, CIS and LATAM based on the share of manufacturing organisations where ransomware attempts were detected and prevented, the total number of manufacturing organisations in each region, average downtime hours after real attacks, average number of employees per organisation and average hourly pay.

According to Kaspersky Security Network from January to September 2025, the Middle East (7%) and Latin America (6.5%) led the regional rankings in terms of ransomware detections in manufacturing organisations. APAC (6.3%), Africa (5.8%), CIS (5.2%) and Europe (3.8%) followed.

All of these attacks were blocked by Kaspersky solutions. The estimation of potential losses (below) shows the financial impact if these attacks succeeded.

When ransomware hits, production lines halt, triggering immediate revenue losses from an idle workforce and longer-term shortfalls from reduced output. The average attack lasts 13 days (based on the Kaspersky Incident Response Report) As a result, idle labour costs from ransomware in the first three quarters of 2025 could have reached:

$11.5 billion in APAC, $4.4 billion in Europe, $711 million in LATAM, $685 million in the Middle East, $507 million in CIS and $446 million in Africa.

Actual business losses could have been significantly higher when factoring in supply-chain disruptions, reputational damage, and recovery expenses.

 

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