Learn 28% hit by ransomware

Almost a third of businesses have been affected by ransomware, according to a report by Databarracks.

The 2019 Data Health Check surveyed 400 IT decision makers at UK companies, looking into cyber security, IT resilience, and cloud computing.

This year, the report focused more on people, asking how they react to the industry.

The report found that, when discovering what has caused data loss within UK businesses, cyber attacks saw an 11% increase since 2014.

Incidents of cyber attacks being a cause of downtime doubled since 2016.

Databarracks claims this trend will continue: “The rate at which it does is hard to predict and will depends on improvements made to defensive and responsive measures.”

This year, there was a small decrease in how many IT professionals think employees ‘flout security policies’. Databarracks believes this is a good way to measure progress, as getting user buy-in for security policies is vital.

When looking into how frequently companies restore from backups, daily restores were seen to jump the most. Databarracks suggests this might be due to more cyber issues and/or less reliable systems.

Only half of respondents to the survey conducted tests to their Disaster Recovery process in the past 12 months, however this is a slight rise since the 2018 report.

The report saw that ransomware attacks on businesses has almost doubled since 2016, to 28%, whilst the number of businesses hit by Adware has doubled to 22%.

Peter Groucutt, Managing Director for Databarracks, concluded: “There are some encouraging signs in continuity, with testing becoming more regular and a broader range of people are getting involved in continuity planning.

Read the report here.