09:45

The Guardian has spoken to an IT worker whose company has paid out in total around £80,000 to ransomware attackers over the last year, most recently following an attack three months ago.

The 34-year-old IT support worker in the UK, who wishes to remain anonymous, said once the ransom was handed over, those behind the attack were “very, very helpful”.

Due to the high level of encryption the company was provided keys to decrypt the files with the worker describing the “support” from company from the hackers - given once they had extorted the ransom fee and after causing huge disruption - as “excellent”.

“The data we had was encrypted on a number of volumes due to a Windows vulnerability. We experienced a few attacks which were often happening as a result of someone opening a Word document containing a malicious macro,” he said.

“These attacks probably happen more often than we think. I don’t think the people behind the ransomware attacks realised it would be as successful as it is. These days it’s about the value of real time data - data that is a day old can normally be recovered by backups. But the possibility of data loss for even 24 hours in some industries can have massive ramifications. This makes the files more valuable.”