If you’re running a small or medium-sized business (SMB) in Germany, it’s easy to think ransomware is a “big company” problem. You see the headlines about corporate giants getting hit, but your 30-person shop? You’re probably flying under the radar, right?
Wrong.
We decided to cut through the noise and run the numbers to find the actual odds of a German business your size getting hit by a significant ransomware attack in a given year. The results are a serious wake-up call.
Why Public Ransomware Stats Are Garbage 🗑️
First things first: you can’t trust the public numbers. Looking at ransomware leak sites to gauge your risk is like trying to guess the size of an iceberg by what you see above the water.
In 2024, these sites listed about 180 incidents for Germany. The real number is massively higher. Here’s what’s hiding below the surface:
- 🤫 The Silent Payoffs: Research from firms like Coveware shows that around 30% of victims just pay the ransom. When they pay, they don’t get listed on a shame site. The incident vanishes from public view.
- 💥 The “Encrypt-Only” Attacks: Not every attack involves stealing data. Sometimes, the goal is just to lock you out of your own systems. Experts estimate this happens in about 10% of cases, meaning they never make it to a leak site.
- 🙈 The Reporting Black Hole: This is the real kicker. Recent research shows that only 40% of ransomware victims ever report the crime to the police. The FBI’s takedown of the Hive ransomware gang was even more telling—they found that official reports only accounted for 20% of Hive’s actual victims.
Just look at the official data from Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA). They recorded around 950 company-reported ransomware cases in 2024. That’s already 5x more than the public leak sites show. And if that’s only the 40% who reported… you can see how the real number explodes.
Building a Realistic Threat Model 🎯
So, how do we get to a number we can actually use? We have to model the uncertainty.
- Establish a Baseline: If the 950 reported cases are just 40% of the picture, the true total could be closer to 2,500 incidents a year in Germany. That’s our realistic, data-backed estimate.
- Run a “Digital Stress Test”: Since hackers don’t publish their annual reports, we used a Monte Carlo simulation. Think of it as a computer running thousands of “what-if” scenarios to find the most probable outcomes. We fed it a range of possibilities, from optimistic to pessimistic:
- Minimum: 250 annual incidents.
- Most Likely: 1,000 incidents (based on BKA data).
- Maximum: 3,000 incidents (accounting for massive underreporting).
- Define the Target: We ran these simulations against the roughly 350,000 businesses in Germany with 10-50 employees.
The Bottom Line: Your Annual Odds Revealed
After all the number-crunching, here is the moment of truth. For a German business with 10-50 employees, the average annual likelihood of getting hit with a major encryption or data exfiltration attack is:
0.40% — or a 1 in 250 chance.
To put that in perspective, if you gathered 250 German SMBs in a room, odds are that one of them will face a serious ransomware event this year.
Of course, reality exists in a range. Our simulation gives us a 90% confidence interval, which is the most likely spread of outcomes:
- Best-Case Scenario (5th Percentile): A 0.16% likelihood (a 1 in 617 chance).
- Worst-Case Scenario (95th Percentile): A 0.71% likelihood (a 1 in 140 chance).
Don’t Just Know the Risk—Crush It 💪
This 1-in-250 number isn’t meant to scare you. It’s a tool.
It’s the hard data you can bring to your next budget meeting to justify better security. It’s the reason you finally prioritize that incident response plan you’ve been putting off. It’s how you turn your business from a potential victim into a hardened target.
The threat is real, but it’s no longer an unknown. You know the odds. The next move is yours.
