Is backup and recovery enough for organizations to mitigate cybercrime?

To reduce cybercrime in Southeast Asia, collaboration and trust will be key to protecting communities, be it at home or the workplace. For Interpol, their role in cybercrime is to protect the communities and it can only be done if the intel is provided to them.

This was the key highlight from Craig Jones, Interpol Cybercrime Director for APAC during his presentation at the Acronis CyberFit Summit in Singapore. As much as Interpol wants to help organizations deal with cybercrime, they are not the first responders to any cyberattack. The first responders are the cybersecurity systems that organizations have in place to deal with cyberattacks.

What’s more concerning is that a lot of cybercrime cases are not reported. Simply because organizations fear the impacts of such incidences. Statistics have shown companies’ reputations being impacted by cybercrime. For those that have paid the ransom, there is no guarantee they get all their data back or won’t be targeted again.

In his opening address, Patrick Pulvermueller, CEO at Acronis, said “The threats are continuously increasing because it is an easy way to reap a lot of benefit without being found.”

For Jones, cybercrime is no longer just about cybercriminals in hoodies. It’s a business model as they have evolved and have their own criminal business supply chain. The rise of ransomware-as-a-service is proof of how the cybercrime supply chain continues to be motivated by cybercriminals who are only after financial gains.

Jones’s presentation pretty much sums up cybercrime in the region. Indeed, it’s a big and growing problem for all organizations, especially with remote working and more technologies being adopted by them.

Sheena Wee, an analyst at Canalys echoed Jones’s sentiments. According to Wee, as the entire world is increasingly at risk from different breeds of attacks, accelerating to universal all-in-one solutions is the only way to achieve truly complete protection.

“Attackers don’t discriminate when it comes to means or targets, so implementing strong and reliable security is no longer a ‘nice-to-have’, it’s a necessity and one of the most important steps businesses and consumers should employ to protect themselves,” explained Wee.

Mitigating cybercrime

Speaking at a forum during the summit, Bryce Boland, Head of Security for ASEAN at AWS said that most organizations only take cybersecurity as a wake-up call once they have been targeted. He pointed out that it all goes down to how prepared the organization is in dealing with a cyberattack. This includes ensuring they have sufficient backup and recovery options and have also tested them to ensure they are able to ensure business continuity.

Unfortunately, he said that a lot of organizations only find out to do these things when the attack happens. And it is going to be a difficult path to recovery for them.

“Whenever an organization is breached, companies need to understand how they got in and what they do. It may only be the tip of the icebergs. They may have left back doors. This is where an incident response team comes in. If you don’t have one, you should look to your tech partner to help you to get an incident response capability to understand what happened and be able to take steps to mitigate the damage and avoid the same issues in the future,” commented Boland.

As such, Kevin Reed, CISO at Acronis highlighted that Acronis blocked 5.8 million URLs on workloads in January 2022, after email filtering. They have seen that 37% of workloads have at least one malware attack blocked in 2021.

“Backup is king when it comes to ransomware protection. And in December, our customer made more than 91 million backups,” said Reed.

For the last three years, Acronis pioneered the field of cyber protection as the first company to combine cybersecurity, data protection, and management into one solution. Over 20,000 service providers are using Acronis Cyber Protect to protect more than 750,000 businesses.

Acronis cloud business in Asia grew by 72% in the number of workloads protected, and by 49% in the number of businesses protected, the most impressive growth year over year.

In addition to its business expansion, the company has been aggressively growing its workforce. Apart from its Synapsys acquisition in 2021,  Acronis now has 44 data centers across the globe, with plans to expand to over 100 locations worldwide within the next two years. Acronis has also released plans to open five data centers in APAC in 2022.

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