Acronis: only 20% of companies have not been hit by a cyber attack this year

Based on the latest edition of its Acronis Cyber Readiness Report 2021, Acronis said that only 20% of companies surveyed were not attacked this year, up from 32% last year. The report, which surveyed organizations on their cyber readiness, revealed that underestimating the latest threats by IT managers and inadequate training and security for remote workers were among the top risk factors.

In addition to the fact that 80% of organisations have experienced a cyber attack this year, 30% face such an attack at least once a day. While companies are getting better at detecting them, a large number of IT managers tend to underestimate the threats. For example, half of IT managers say they don’t use multi-factor authentication because they don’t see the value in it or find it too complex. Then, more than half of companies have a false sense of security when it comes to “supply chain” attacks because they don’t understand the nature of them and only use familiar, traditional software to protect themselves.

Highlights from the Acronis Cyber Readiness Report 2021:

• 29% of organizations surveyed were targeted monthly this year, 22% weekly, 20% daily and 9% even hourly. The remaining 20% have not experienced an attack this year.
• The most common types of attacks include phishing (58%), DDoS attacks (40%), malware attacks (36.5%) and video conferencing attacks (31.5%)
• This year, 57% of IT managers see the main challenges as training remote workers, 50% in securing them, and 44.5% in ensuring the availability of corporate applications and networks.
• Only 52% of IT managers use multi-factor authentication on most of their accounts, 38% only on some, and 10% not at all.
• Against “supply chain” attacks, 53% of administrators do not use special protection but only traditional proven tools, 24% use AV/EDR scanning and 18% outsource protection.
• When choosing tools, IT managers prefer antimalware/antivirus (73%), integrated backup & disaster recovery (48%), patch management (45%) and RMM tools (36%).

“The number of attacks this year has not only increased in quantity, but also in the ingenuity of specific attack methods, which requires a change in approach and expansion of protection methods,” said Aleš Hok, sales director at ZEBRA SYSTEMS, which represents Acronis in the Czech Republic and Slovakia. “The idea of savings on cyber protection is tempting only until we realise that the damage caused by cyber attackers is always several orders of magnitude higher than the cost of prevention. Underestimating the current threats and cyber protection needs is therefore definitely not worthwhile.”

The full study can be downloaded here.