The Ransomware landscape, as it exists today, presents a very scary picture for the IT and security professionals. From a ‘far-and-few-in-between’, the attacks have now become routine. Ransomware will cost its victims more than $265 billion annually by 2031, says Cybersecurity Ventures. So much is the impact of ransomware that is has become the most prominent malware threat today.
According to a Sophos report, 37% of the respondents’ organizations were affected by ransomware attacks in the last year.
In 2021, the largest ransomware pay out was made by CNA Financial, a US Insurance major, which paid a ransom of US$40 million, setting a world record. A Norwegian aluminium maker Norsk Hydro though decided not to pay any ransom, lost over $40 million in business due to a ransomware attack and tool weeks to recover its IT systems. The average ransom fee requested has increased from $5,000 in 2018 to around $200,000 in 2020.
Experts estimate that one ransomware attack will occur every 11 seconds in 2021. About 1 in 6,000 emails contain suspicious URLs, including ransomware. 71% of those who are affected by ransomware have been infected. Half of the ransomware attacks that are successful infect at least 20 computers in the organisation.
In such a scenario not only is it important to have an effective strategy to deal with this menace but also to have a dependable, reliable and safe data backup strategy to quickly bounce back and run business as usual. Data backup, which was considered to be a luxury in not-so-recent past, is now IT’s biggest necessity and a continuous upgradation is mandated due to changing nature of attacks.
DynamicCISO recently caught up (virtually) with Dave Russell, backup guru and currently the Vice President of Enterprise Strategy at Veeam Software to understand the criticality of Ransomware attacks and importance of a sound data management and back up strategy.
Listen in to this 24-minutes interaction and learn the art of Back Up from the guru himself.