Proactive Management With Real-time Visibility
In January 2022, an independent research firm completed a survey of 1,000 unbiased IT leaders regarding the impact that ransomware had within their environments, as well as their remediation methods and future facing strategies. Responses came from members of one of four professions (i.e., CISOs, security professionals, backup administrators and IT operations) and represented organizations of all sizes across 16 different countries from APJ, EMEA and the Americas – including 300 from EMEA.
Overall, these results revealed at least three key areas of discovery:
- The effectiveness and pervasiveness of bad actors
- Key attributes of a successful remediation strategy
- Opportunities for improvement between the teams responsible for proactive prevention and reactive remediation
The effectiveness and pervasiveness of bad actors
Even with the global awareness of ransomware and malware, plus the ever-increasing vigilance of IT teams, the most common entry point for ransomware continues to be users accidentally clicking malicious links, visiting insecure websites or engaging with phishing emails, according to 44% of survey respondents worldwide and 46% in EMEA. That said, far too many cyber criminals also gain access through infected software packages and compromised credentials.
After gaining the ability to navigate within an organization’s environment, most attackers (80%) seek out mainstream systems with known vulnerabilities, including common operating systems and hypervisors, as well as NAS platforms and database servers. One of the more interesting insights that came from this survey was whether certain facets of a hybrid or distributed IT infrastructure may be more (or less) vulnerable to cyberattacks. When organizations were asked about which parts of their environments had been encrypted, they said:
- 48% suffered encryption of servers within their datacenters
- 49% suffered encryption of platforms within their remote offices
- 46% suffered encryption of cloud-hosted server instances
In EMEA, 47% of datacenter servers, 50% of remote offices and 44% of cloud instances were impacted. Perhaps more alarming is the effectiveness of attackers to proactively destroy their victim’s data backup repositories.
To read full download the whitepaper:
2022 Ransomware Trends Report
