Skip links

Mitigating Cybercrime with Backups

According to studies, one of the primary causes of an organisation becoming a victim of cybercrime is human error.

The consequences of a data breach can be significant and long-lasting. When a data breach happens, a hacker might gain access to your personal or organisation’s sensitive data leading to potential financial loss, reputation damage, privacy violations, and identity theft. A breach can also halt operations, and lead to a loss of information and setbacks in the organisation’s daily operations.

According to the IBM X-Force Threat Intelligence Index 2022, these are a few of the current cybercrime trends:

  • Ransomware was the number one attack type with 21% of attacks
  • 41% of attacks used phishing to gain initial access
  • There was a 146% increase in Linux ransomware
  • Phishing campaigns that added phone calls (vishing or voice phishing) were three times more effective, netting a click from 53.2% of victims.

It’s important for companies to have strong security measures in place to prevent data breaches and to have a plan in place for responding to a breach in the event that it does occur.

Conduct Regular Data Backups

One way of trying to mitigate the problems posed by cybercrime is to conduct regular data backups. Protecting your information, both personal and for business, to ensure that you don’t suffer from any data loss should your machine be infected by malware, or in the event that a data breach occurs.

There are several ways to back up data, including:

  • Copying files to an external hard drive that can be stored in a different location.
  • Burning data to CDs or DVDs as a backup. Although most modern desktops and laptops are being released without optical drives.
  • Storing data on a network-connected hard drive that can be accessed from multiple devices.
  • Using services that automatically backup data to the cloud, remote servers over the internet.

It’s recommended to use multiple methods to backup data to ensure maximum protection and security.

Cloud Backups

According to Cloudflare, the cloud refers to servers all over the world that are accessed over the internet, and the software and databases that run on those servers. So instead of accessing information on your local device, you can access files and applications from almost any device, because the computing and storage takes place on servers in a data centre.

Now when we refer to cloud backup, we mean that the data and applications on a business’ servers are backed up and stored on a remote server over the internet. Kept readily available in case the system has been compromised and there is a need to restore information to ensure business continuity.

By backing up data in the cloud you isolate your data from any local device failure, malware attacks or natural disasters.

Acronis Backup and Recovery

Acronis Cyber Protect integrates backup with advanced anti-ransomware technologies to keep your data safe from any threat. It stores data in a unified backup format so you can easily recover to any platform, regardless of whether the source system was physical, virtual, cloud or a mobile environment.

With Acronis, you can backup individual files or safeguard your entire business by backing up the entire system as a single file. In the event of a data disaster, you can easily restore all information to new hardware and have your virtual machine up and running in seconds, while Acronis Instant Restore technology moves your data across in the background.

Due to Acronis’ integrated approach, you don’t have to worry about restoring malware after you’ve recovered your data. The system has built-in malware scanning and conducts anti-malware scanning of backups to prevent the restoring of infected files.

Drop us a line if you are worried about your security measures or if you want to chat to us about putting a data breach plan in place.