How to protect your business from ransomware

More businesses are falling victim to ransomware. Here's what you need to know about it and how to better protect your employee data.

According to the Veeam Ransomware Trends Report 2023, which surveyed 1,200 organisations across 14 countries that suffered a total of 3,000 cyber attacks combined, found that 85 per cent of global organisations faced at least one cyber attack.

“An alarming 85 per cent of global organisations suffered at least one cyber attack in the last year, according to the latest Veeam Data Protection Trends Report,” said Dan Middleton, Veeam vice president for UK and Ireland.

Veeam also found that of the roughly 80 per cent of organisations that did pay ransom, 21 per cent didn’t get their data back.

“This makes any effort to avoid paying the ransom to regain access to data void and proves that simply backing up data is no longer enough to guarantee that critical data is protected from the relentless onslaught of attacks faced by organisations across the region,” added Middleton.

A major concern is cyber insurance, which provides breached organisations with the funds to cover ransomware payments.

This has led to both cyber criminals charging more than what an organisation is covered by, as well as insurance companies increasing their premiums while excluding ransomware payments from their security coverage.

According to Veeam, 21 per cent of organisations found that ransomware was explicitly excluded from security coverage, while 74 per cent saw their security premiums increase, 43 per cent saw deductibles increase, and 10 per cent had coverage reduced.

The report said that having backup credentials and running automated cyber detection scans, as well as keeping data backups, is a better way to ensure that data is recovered than paying ransomware demands.

Of those targeted by ransomware attacks, Veeam said a mere 16 per cent were able to avoid paying due to having backups in place.

However, backups need to be kept properly secure, as 93 per cent of cyber criminals target backup repositories, leading to 75 per cent of targeted organisations losing some of their backups, while an additional third lose everything.

Backup recovery can also lead to data being reinfected, with 56 per cent of organisations not ensuring that backup data is clean.

Australia, among other nations, is looking into outlawing ransomware payments completely, a move that has had a mixed response.

The nation’s largest energy producer AGL said that banning ransomware payments could have severe consequences.

“Prohibiting the payment of ransom or extortion demands may reduce the volume of attacks,” said AGL.

“However, such a prohibition may result in potentially avoidable catastrophic damage, harm to community, loss of life, disruption of essential services or disclosure of sensitive information.

“In some circumstances and for some organisations, the payment of a ransom demand may be the only path to achieving acceptable outcomes.”

This article originally appeared on HR Leader's sister brand Cyber Security Connect.