80 percent of companies participating in Druva's new ransomware report have said ransomware attacks are on the rise, half of businesses hit by ransomware were attacked multiple times.
The report describes ransomware as “the great equaliser, a ubiquitous global threat affecting enterprises large and small and devices of all types.”
The report's release presents many worrying findings; according to those surveyed, “70 percent of attacks spread to multiple devices” and “82 percent of survey respondents reported a rise in the rate of attacks.”
“Enterprises are equally impacted regardless of company size, device type or location of data,” says the report, which adds, “eight out of ten times, organisations rely on backups to restore and recover crucial data after an attack.
“It's no longer a question of if an organisation will be the victim of a ransomware attack, but when. Druva's Ransomware Report underscores the importance of planning. Simply put, protecting data protects your bottom line,” said Jaspreet Singh, CEO, Druva.
The report appears to be timely: it was discovered today that if your data is encrypted by the NotPetya ransomware, you are unable to get it back as the email address which would respond with your decryption key has been shut down. The criminals behind the infection used the same email address for every infection.
“It's no surprise that more and more companies are relying on backup to recover from ransomware attacks. Simple preventative planning greatly mitigates what could otherwise be costly and destructive to data recovery, not to mention devastating to overall business viability,” Singh added.
The report's release goes on to warn that, “Ransomware has quadrupled over the past year, reaching an estimated US $1 billion (£770,060,070 million) in 2016 with 4,000 attacks occurring per day,” and this figure is set to grow in 2017.
According to leading analyst firm Gartner, “Ransomware is on the rise, and backup remains the best protection against data loss.As a fail-safe, organisations should implement enterprise endpoint backup for laptops/workstations, and set recovery point objectives (RPOs) for each server deemed to be at greater risk to ransomware according to organisational requirements, based on data loss time frame acceptable to the organisation.”
