Report: Pandemic Reveals Cybersecurity Gaps

A new study shows that organizations continue to struggle to protect their data and infrastructure against the new challenges of the remote work landscape.

The newly released Acronis Cyber Readiness Report takes a close look at how prepared organizations were to adapt to the pandemic’s impact on their IT operations and cybersecurity posture. Acronis, a Swiss-based company specializing in backup, disaster recovery, secure file access, sync and share, and partitioning software, surveyed 3,400 companies and remote workers from around the world during June and July 2020.

The report says that 92% of surveyed companies needed to adopt new technologies to enable remote work, including workplace collaboration tools, privacy solutions, and endpoint cybersecurity. Hackers targeting remote workers most frequently leveraged phishing, distributed denial of service (DDoS), and videoconferencing attacks among their most common tactics used.

Malware attacks, such as ransomware, also have increased during the pandemic, with half of all surveyed companies reporting they are targeted at least once a week. This includes small companies as well as large ones. More than 30% of responding companies said they are attacked by malware every day, and 39% of companies experienced videoconferencing attacks in the past three months.

“The cyberthreat landscape has changed dramatically during the past few years, and in the last six months in particular,” said Serguei “SB” Beloussov, founder and CEO of Acronis. “Organizations that modernize their stack with integrated data protection and cybersecurity not only gain greater security, they lower their costs and improve efficiencies.”

Channel Impact^®
As businesses around the world reacted to the COVID-19 pandemic, many had to address new risks to their infrastructure, endpoints, and mission-critical data. The shift to remote work alone introduced a range of new challenges – from closing security gaps with new technology to educating now-remote employees to avoid phishing attacks to strengthening the protection of third-party apps needed to work from home.