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9 out 10 made at least one ransomware payment last year

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Ransomware attacks have risen dramatically in just over a year, which has led to the vast majority of IT decision-makers reporting they’ve made at least one payment in the same timeframe.

These were among the findings of cybersecurity solutions company ExtraHop, which found that 95% of people who provide input into their company’s IT decisions reported experiencing at least one ransomware incident last year. The average number of incidents, which include both successful and non-successful ransomware attempts, was eight. The data indicates that organizations are increasingly losing ground against ransomware; while 9% said they experienced no incidents in 2022, last year that proportion shrank to 5%. ExtraHop said that, in the most recent survey, 58% of organizations experienced six or more incidents in 2023, up 32% year over year.

Further, people are actually paying these ransoms more often. ExtraHop said 91% of organizations paid at least one ransom last year, and 75% of respondents said they paid more than half the time. The number of organizations never having paid a ransom has significantly decreased — in the 2022 survey results, 28% of respondents never paid the ransom, compared to 17% in 2023 and 9% in 2024.

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“We suspect more organizations are paying ransoms because they can’t afford not to pay. This could be due to a variety of factors. For one, they may lack the business and operational resilience to weather a ransomware attack. So they pay the ransom out of desperation or necessity, believing that paying the ransom provides them with the quickest path back to restored business operations. And when people’s health or lives are at stake, some organizations have no choice but to pay,” said the report, though it noted that paying the ransom doesn’t guarantee an organization will get its data back, and that other research shows that organizations that have fallen victim to a ransomware attack are six times more likely to be targeted again over the next three months.

The most common payment amount, taking up 41.6% of ransoms, was somewhere between $500,000 and $1 million.

This is part of the overall trend of growing cybercrime costs. A February study from Statista said that in 2024 alone the global cost of cybercrime is expected to be $9.22 trillion — an eye-watering sum that is roughly equal to the GDP of Japan and Germany combined. By 2028, costs are estimated to rise even further to $13.82 trillion, just four trillion short of China’s entire GDP. This cost included stolen money, damage and destruction of data, lost productivity, theft of intellectual property, theft of personal or financial data, post-attack disruption to the ordinary course of business, restoration and deletion of hacked data and systems, and reputational harm.

Putting things in private sector terms, the estimate cybercrime toll in 2024 is about as big as the total market caps of Microsoft, Apple, Google and NVIDIA combined — or about 19 times the total value of Walmart.

Costs like this include ransomware, yes, but other kinds of cybercrime as well, like identity theft, which tends to be driven by data breaches. These, too, are on the rise according to cybersecurity solutions provider Surfshark, with data breaches having grown by 434.9% from just Q3 to Q4 of 2023. In the third quarter of 2023, 627 accounts were being breached every minute. In the fourth quarter, however, 3,353 accounts were leaked every 60 seconds. The U.S. experienced about 90 million breaches, more than any other country; China was a distant second, at about 70 million. However, when looking at things in terms of growth, the data shows that the central Asian nation of Kyrgyzstan seems to be under some sort of cyber crime wave, as breaches have increased 19,240% over the course of a year.

Regardless, numbers like these indicate that cybercrime is, unfortunately, a booming business.

“Some still believe a typical hacker is just a guy wearing a hoodie in a dark room. But that isn’t true anymore. Cybercrime has evolved into a professionalized global enterprise with skilled hackers, nation-state backed groups, and organized cybercrime rings working in tandem,” said Carlos Salas, a cybersecurity expert at virtual private network provider NordLayer.

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Accounting

IAASB tweaks standards on working with outside experts

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The International Auditing and Assurance Standards Board is proposing to tailor some of its standards to align with recent additions to the International Ethics Standards Board for Accountants’ International Code of Ethics for Professional Accountants when it comes to using the work of an external expert.

The proposed narrow-scope amendments involve minor changes to several IAASB standards:

  • ISA 620, Using the Work of an Auditor’s Expert;
  • ISRE 2400 (Revised), Engagements to Review Historical Financial Statements;
  • ISAE 3000 (Revised), Assurance Engagements Other than Audits or Reviews of Historical Financial Information;
  • ISRS 4400 (Revised), Agreed-upon Procedures Engagements.

The IAASB is asking for comments via a digital response template that can be found on the IAASB website by July 24, 2025.

In December 2023, the IESBA approved an exposure draft for proposed revisions to the IESBA’s Code of Ethics related to using the work of an external expert. The proposals included three new sections to the Code of Ethics, including provisions for professional accountants in public practice; professional accountants in business and sustainability assurance practitioners. The IESBA approved the provisions on using the work of an external expert at its December 2024 meeting, establishing an ethical framework to guide accountants and sustainability assurance practitioners in evaluating whether an external expert has the necessary competence, capabilities and objectivity to use their work, as well as provisions on applying the Ethics Code’s conceptual framework when using the work of an outside expert.  

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Accounting

Tariffs will hit low-income Americans harder than richest, report says

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President Donald Trump’s tariffs would effectively cause a tax increase for low-income families that is more than three times higher than what wealthier Americans would pay, according to an analysis from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.

The report from the progressive think tank outlined the outcomes for Americans of all backgrounds if the tariffs currently in effect remain in place next year. Those making $28,600 or less would have to spend 6.2% more of their income due to higher prices, while the richest Americans with income of at least $914,900 are expected to spend 1.7% more. Middle-income families making between $55,100 and $94,100 would pay 5% more of their earnings. 

Trump has imposed the steepest U.S. duties in more than a century, including a 145% tariff on many products from China, a 25% rate on most imports from Canada and Mexico, duties on some sectors such as steel and aluminum and a baseline 10% tariff on the rest of the country’s trading partners. He suspended higher, customized tariffs on most countries for 90 days.

Economists have warned that costs from tariff increases would ultimately be passed on to U.S. consumers. And while prices will rise for everyone, lower-income families are expected to lose a larger portion of their budgets because they tend to spend more of their earnings on goods, including food and other necessities, compared to wealthier individuals.

Food prices could rise by 2.6% in the short run due to tariffs, according to an estimate from the Yale Budget Lab. Among all goods impacted, consumers are expected to face the steepest price hikes for clothing at 64%, the report showed. 

The Yale Budget Lab projected that the tariffs would result in a loss of $4,700 a year on average for American households.

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Accounting

At Schellman, AI reshapes a firm’s staffing needs

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Artificial intelligence is just getting started in the accounting world, but it is already helping firms like technology specialist Schellman do more things with fewer people, allowing the firm to scale back hiring and reduce headcount in certain areas through natural attrition. 

Schellman CEO Avani Desai said there have definitely been some shifts in headcount at the Top 100 Firm, though she stressed it was nothing dramatic, as it mostly reflects natural attrition combined with being more selective with hiring. She said the firm has already made an internal decision to not reduce headcount in force, as that just indicates they didn’t hire properly the first time. 

“It hasn’t been about reducing roles but evolving how we do work, so there wasn’t one specific date where we ‘started’ the reduction. It’s been more case by case. We’ve held back on refilling certain roles when we saw opportunities to streamline, especially with the use of new technologies like AI,” she said. 

One area where the firm has found such opportunities has been in the testing of certain cybersecurity controls, particularly within the SOC framework. The firm examined all the controls it tests on the service side and asked which ones require human judgment or deep expertise. The answer was a lot of them. But for the ones that don’t, AI algorithms have been able to significantly lighten the load. 

“[If] we don’t refill a role, it’s because the need actually has changed, or the process has improved so significantly [that] the workload is lighter or shared across the smarter system. So that’s what’s happening,” said Desai. 

Outside of client services like SOC control testing and reporting, the firm has found efficiencies in administrative functions as well as certain internal operational processes. On the latter point, Desai noted that Schellman’s engineers, including the chief information officer, have been using AI to help develop code, which means they’re not relying as much on outside expertise on the internal service delivery side of things. There are still people in the development process, but their roles are changing: They’re writing less code, and doing more reviewing of code before it gets pushed into production, saving time and creating efficiencies. 

“The best way for me to say this is, to us, this has been intentional. We paused hiring in a few areas where we saw overlaps, where technology was really working,” said Desai.

However, even in an age awash with AI, Schellman acknowledges there are certain jobs that need a human, at least for now. For example, the firm does assessments for the FedRAMP program, which is needed for cloud service providers to contract with certain government agencies. These assessments, even in the most stable of times, can be long and complex engagements, to say nothing of the less predictable nature of the current government. As such, it does not make as much sense to reduce human staff in this area. 

“The way it is right now for us to do FedRAMP engagements, it’s a very manual process. There’s a lot of back and forth between us and a third party, the government, and we don’t see a lot of overall application or technology help… We’re in the federal space and you can imagine, [with] what’s going on right now, there’s a big changing market condition for clients and their pricing pressure,” said Desai. 

As Schellman reduces staff levels in some places, it is increasing them in others. Desai said the firm is actively hiring in certain areas. In particular, it’s adding staff in technical cybersecurity (e.g., penetration testers), the aforementioned FedRAMP engagements, AI assessment (in line with recently becoming an ISO 42001 certification body) and in some client-facing roles like marketing and sales. 

“So, to me, this isn’t about doing more with less … It’s about doing more of the right things with the right people,” said Desai. 

While these moves have resulted in savings, she said that was never really the point, so whatever the firm has saved from staffing efficiencies it has reinvested in its tech stack to build its service line further. When asked for an example, she said the firm would like to focus more on penetration testing by building a SaaS tool for it. While Schellman has a proof of concept developed, she noted it would take a lot of money and time to deploy a full solution — both of which the firm now has more of because of its efficiency moves. 

“What is the ‘why’ behind these decisions? The ‘why’ for us isn’t what I think you traditionally see, which is ‘We need to get profitability high. We need to have less people do more things.’ That’s not what it is like,” said Desai. “I want to be able to focus on quality. And the only way I think I can focus on quality is if my people are not focusing on things that don’t matter … I feel like I’m in a much better place because the smart people that I’ve hired are working on the riskiest and most complicated things.”

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