A lot has changed over the last decade, making 2023 the year that every organisation could be hit by ransomware – unless they act on it. Survey after survey shows that the vast majority of organisations faced a ransomware attack in 2021 and 2022 – a significant percentage of which were harmful, and the rate of attack continues to evolve in numbers and sophistication. Businesses across Europe need to strengthen their cyber-resilience to ensure they can recover from the near-inevitability of cybercriminals attacking data on-premises, in the cloud and even in SaaS services.
European Cybersecurity Month presents an opportunity to remind ourselves that ransomware is no longer a possible threat to businesses, but an inevitability. During the first half of 2022, there were more ransomware attacks than in all of 2019, and the figure is well on its way to exceeding the record-breaking heights of 2021. Now is the time to act, businesses must implement solutions to safe-proof themselves from cyber criminals.
A ransom demand is only the start of multiple impacts for an afflicted business – business downtime and disruption to orders after entire file systems are found to be encrypted, future network repair costs and the need to restore the corrupted files as part of recovery phases lasting weeks and even months. In many cases, the overall costs of such a cyber-attack, in particular, the impact on productivity for the organisation often dwarfs the initial ransom demand – even where the demand is in the millions of pounds.
Companies have started to leverage new tools such as cloud-native storage to enable rapid recovery from cyber-attacks and minimise data loss. These products support ‘roll back’ to the exact time prior to a ransomware incident and allow administrators to quickly restore files locally, typically in less than an hour.