Forty-two minutes and 54 seconds: that's how quickly the median ransomware variant can encrypt and lock out a victim from 100,000 of their files.

The data point came from Splunk's SURGe team, which analyzed in its lab how quickly the 10 biggest ransomware strains — Lockbit, REvil, Blackmatter, Conti, Ryuk, Avaddon, Babuk, Darkside, Maize, and Mespinoza — could encrypt 100,000 files consisting of some 53.93 gigabytes of data. Lockbit won the race, with speeds of 86% faster than the median. One Lockbit sample was clocked at encrypting 25,000 files per minute.

Splunk's team found that ransomware variants are all over the map speed-wise, and the underlying hardware can dictate their encryption speeds.

"We created four different 'victim' profiles consisting of Windows 10 and Windows Server 2019 operating systems, each with two different performance specifications benchmarked from customer environments. We then chose 10 different ransomware families and 10 samples from each of those families to test," noted Splunk security practitioner Shannon Davis in a blog post about the study.