Pandemic exploitation by malicious actors is ramping up, and fragmented views on the important of frequent data backups are showing.

While nearly 98% of businesses are backing up the IT components they are responsible for protecting, only 40% back up daily—leaving many businesses with gaps in the valuable data available for recovery.

In Singapore, such practices may have led to 37% of companies surveyed reporting a data loss event that resulted in downtime last year.

The annual survey by Acronis, completed by nearly 3,000 people, gauged the protection habits of users around the globe—including Singapore, home for Acronis international headquarters. Some of the findings include:

  • 94% of Singapore’s individuals back up data and devices, but 60% still lose data due to accidental deletion, hardware or software failure, or an out-of-date backup.
  • 84% of organizations in Singapore are not backing up multiple times per day; only 16% report they are.
  • 24% back up daily, 38% back up weekly, 20% back up monthly, and 2% are not backing up at all.
  • Of those, 37% reported data loss resulting in downtime last year—with 2% more not sure if they had.
  • Only 20% of personal users and 16% of IT professionals followed best practices, employing hybrid backups on local media and in the cloud.

Hackers are exploiting pandemic fears

A peaking volume of COVID-19-related cyber scams was detected in Asia in the past two weeks in China, Vietnam, South Korea and more, with Singapore being one of the most exposed. There is no shortage of malicious actors—both state-sponsored and freelancers—looking to prey on the fear and chaos caused by the global pandemic.

With increasing cyberattacks, traditional backup is targeted by cyber criminals and no longer sufficient to protect data, applications, and systems. The survey shows that relying on backup alone for true business continuity is too dangerous:

  • 80% of IT professionals were concerned with ransomware, 79%—cryptojacking, 80%—social engineering attacks like phishing, and 88%—data breaches. Personal users: nearly as high, rose by 33% compared to the same survey done in 2019.
  • 37% of personal users and 14% of IT professionals would not know if their data was modified unexpectedly.
  • Among the primary reasons for not backing up, individual users in Singapore stated they thought it “not necessary”, “too complicated”, “takes too long”.

To ensure complete protection, secure backups must be part of every organization’s comprehensive cyber protection approach for ransomware protection, disaster recovery, cybersecurity, and management tools. This deeply-integrated approach also addresses the company’s philosophy of Five Vectors of Cyber Protection, delivering safety, accessibility, privacy, authenticity, and security (SAPAS) for all data, applications, and systems.