Acronis: up to one-fifth of organizations experience operational downtime as a result of a ransomware attack

Acronis presented survey results according to which 20% of Czech organizations experienced operational downtime in the past 12 months as a result of a ransomware attack. Approximately half of Czech organizations faced a ransomware attack, one-third managed to fend off the attack, while in the remaining cases, unfortunately, data encryption and operational downtime occurred, including the currently best-known case of the Road and Motorway Directorate (ŘSD).

If an organization becomes the target of such an attack, it has a number of options to avoid the worst. For example, it can fend it off completely without consequences using anti-malware or special ransomware protection. If data encryption has already occurred, it can still quickly restore operations with the help of disaster recovery or working backups. However, if backups fail as well, the organization must face long-term operational downtime with all its consequences. Therefore, IT administrators recommend paying special attention not only to protecting production data but also to protecting backups.

The most interesting survey findings include:

• 47% of organizations did not encounter ransomware at all in the past 12 months, 33% fended off an attack, 18% experienced encryption and short-term downtime, and 2% experienced encryption and long-term downtime
• According to 61% of surveyed IT administrators, the most important data protection factor is the backup immutability feature; 34% cited active self-defense protection of the backup system, and 30% cited storing backups in the cloud.
• 93% of IT professionals mentioned Windows systems as the platform most frequently targeted by similar attacks. Only 5% of IT administrators mentioned the competing macOS.

“The recent attack on the Road and Motorway Directorate (ŘSD) showed that long-term operational downtime resulting from a ransomware attack is not just some virtual scare,” said Aleš Hok, Sales Director at ZEBRA SYSTEMS. “Such outages are usually the result of underestimating attackers' capabilities and overestimating the reliability of existing backups. We therefore recommend protecting backups, for example with a feature ensuring their immutability, and regularly testing them for recovery.”

Source: https://www.acronis.cz/tiskove-zpravy/acronis-az-petina-organizaci-zazije-vypadek-provozu-v-dusledku-ransomwaroveho-utoku/