Staying Protected This Cybersecurity Awareness Month

This month marks both the eighteenth year of National Cybersecurity Awareness Month — an initiative led by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security — and the tenth year of European Cybersecurity month, the European Union’s annual campaign around promoting digital security and staying safe online.

Of course, every month is cybersecurity awareness month at Acronis. But October is as good a time as any to take a look at the current cyberthreat landscape and to take proactive steps towards data safety.

The threat of ransomware looms large

In the Acronis Cyberthreats Report 2020, we predicted that ransomware would be an increasingly dominant danger in 2021. You don’t have to follow the news closely to know how this bore out:

1. At the end of last year, a supply-chain attack on SolarWinds’ Orion software led to data breaches at thousands of their customers, including multiple U.S. government agencies
2. In March, computer giant Acer was hit with the largest ransomware demand to date — $50 million — after a successful REvil attack
3. In May, a DarkSide ransomware attack forced the Colonial Pipeline to shut down for days, causing major disruptions to fuel availability across the U.S. East Coast
4. Also in May, Ireland’s health service operator was forced to shut down all IT systems to prevent ransomware from spreading, crippling diagnostic services and COVID-19 testing
5. In July, a supply-chain attack on Kaseya VSA impacted dozens of their MSP partners and the thousands of small businesses that they, in turn, managed

Once simply a nuisance, today’s cyberattacks can completely devastate businesses and massively disrupt the vital infrastructure we all rely on. The U.S. Department of Justice announced this year that they’d be elevating the investigation of ransomware attacks to a similar priority as terrorism.

It’s clear — from these attacks and others — that effective cybersecurity is more important now than ever.

Staying safe online

It’s not only nation-states and massive enterprises that attract the attention of cybercriminals. Many attacks are now automated, making it trivially easy for threat actors to strike even the smallest businesses and individual home users.

What’s more, modern cyberattacks are often quite sophisticated. They attempt to disable antivirus solutions and delete backups, preventing you from easily recovering lost data. Many cyber criminals even steal sensitive information off your systems, then threaten to publish it online if their ransom demands aren’t met.

To stay safe from these threats, a proactive approach is needed — one that integrates cybersecurity, data backups, and the ability to quickly recover from disaster. We call this cyber protection, and it’s the driving force behind Acronis’ solutions for businesses, service providers, and home users. This holistic approach allows for unparalleled protection, with unique capabilities — like automatically detecting and removing malware from your backups, or restarting business operations from the cloud if your local hardware is physically damaged or locked up. And with award-winning, threat-agnostic detection that blocks malware based on its malicious behaviors, you’ll be protected against even never-before-seen cyber threats.

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