By ; Basel Khaled – Nahal Makled
Acronis, a global leader in cyber protection, announced the release of Acronis Cyber Protect 15, which integrates backup, disaster recovery, next-generation antimalware, cybersecurity, and endpoint management tools into a single solution. This one-of-a-kind integration eliminates the complexity of ensuring an organization’s cybersecurity, while improving its data recovery posture and enabling greater productivity.
The new product comes at a time when businesses are struggling to safeguard their data and infrastructure against the risks of the new remote work landscape. The Acronis Cyber Readiness Report, which surveyed 3,400 global companies and remote workers in the wake of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, revealed that 92% of the companies surveyed say they’ve adopted new technologies to enable remote work, including workplace collaboration tools, privacy solutions, and endpoint cybersecurity.
The challenge for organizations is that managing the protection of data across the company network and all of those new devices using a stack of different solutions is expensive, time-consuming, and complicated. The lack of integration also creates gaps in the organization’s defenses that cybercriminals are exploiting.
The Acronis Cyber Readiness Report reveals that as hackers target remote workers, phishing, distributed denial of service (DDoS), and videoconferencing attacks are the most common tactics used.
39% of the companies experienced a videoconferencing attack in the past three months as workers rely on apps like Zoom, Cisco Webex, and Microsoft Teams. Cisco recently revealed a vulnerability in its Webex app that could allow attackers to open, read, and steal potentially valuable or damaging content.
Malware attacks such as ransomware also have increased during the pandemic, with 31% of companies reporting daily cyberattacks and half (50%) being targeted at least once a week, including in July when a leading manufacturer of GPS technologies allegedly paid $10 million in a WastedLocker ransomware attack. Acronis Cyber Protection Operating Centers (CPOCs) found that 35% of customer endpoints were exposed to malware attacks that were still getting through before the deployment of Acronis Cyber Protect.
Phishing attacks are occurring at historic levels, which is not surprising since the report found only 2% of companies consider URL filtering when evaluating a cybersecurity solution. That oversight leaves remote workers vulnerable to phishing sites – Acronis CPOCs discovered that approximately 10% of users clicked on malicious websites in May, June, and July.
These Acronis findings and external research illustrate why organizations need a cyber protection solution that reduces complexity and improves security to support remote work environments, and the solution must be cost-effective to address the scale of remote workers.
