Nearly 60% of companies are ‘very’ to ‘extremely’ concerned about ransomware attacks, according to research from Hornetsecurity. In its annual Ransomware Survey, Hornetsecurity found that 92.5% businesses are aware of ransomware’s potential for negative impact, but just 54% of respondents said their leadership is ‘actively involved in conversations and decision-making’ around preventing such attacks. Four in ten (39.7%) said they were happy to ‘leave it to IT to deal with the issue’.
93.2% of respondents rank ransomware protection as ‘very’ to ‘extremely’ important in terms of IT priorities for their organization, and 87.8% of respondents confirmed they have a disaster recovery plan in place for a ransomware attack.
However, that leaves more than one in eight organizations (12.2%) without a disaster recovery plan. Of those companies, more than half cited a ‘lack of resources or time’ as the primary reason. Additionally, one-third of respondents said a disaster recovery plan is ‘not considered a priority by management’.
The survey revealed the most used tools to combat potential threats:
- 87.8% use end-point detection software with anti-ransomware capabilities.
- 84.4% use ‘email filtration and threat analysis’.
- 22.4% stated that ‘AI-enabled security solutions’ are a tool that they are now using to combat ransomware within their organization.
The most common primary security feature to protect backups from ransomware is:
- Immutable storage (40.6% of respondents)
- Tight control of user and application permissions (38.3%)
- Air-gapped storage (27.8%).
Given the developing and unpredictable nature of ransomware attacks, 76.2% of respondents said their business has changed the way it backs up its data. The 73.6% of respondents who have a recovery plan in place for their Microsoft 365 data are ‘very’ to ‘extremely’ confident in their chosen solution, while 55.1% of respondents are ‘very’ to ‘extremely’ confident that their data backups would be safe from a ransomware attack today.
