Do not stay in the cold on April 1st - make a backup

On April 1, almost the whole world celebrates Fool's Day. On this day, it is customary to play pranks on and make fun of your friends and colleagues, to have fun and not to trust anyone, in order not to be stupid. But if you have friends and colleagues, and we hope that you have relatively harmless jokes and jokes, then modern cybercriminals have a very “peculiar” sense of humor. For example, they can steal the client database of your company, hack your account on a social network, or simply block your access to data using an ransomware program.



Today, on World Backup Day, which just precedes the first of April, we have completed a study on data protection and storage, and we want to share its results with you.

A user survey was conducted worldwide on the Google Survey platform and showed that more than 34% of respondents at least once faced with the loss of their data. The share of those who actively use backup solutions is more than 70%, and the key indicators for them are security, ease of use and the amount of available cloud.
')
Last year, according to leading experts in the field of security, was the year of extortion programs . Yes, they appeared before, but it was in 2016 that their distribution took the scale of a real epidemic. According to a study by Kaspersky Lab , over the past year, 62 new families of ransomware programs emerged, and the number of their new modifications increased 11 times - from 2.9 to 32 thousand. The number of attacks with their use has tripled, and according to the data of the US Federal Bureau of Investigations , the total damage from them exceeded 1 billion dollars. Emails, files downloaded from the Internet, attachments to social network messages — this is an incomplete list of the methods by which these malicious programs get into our computers, block our data and demand a ransom for them.

The situation is complicated by the fact that most users do not know anything about extortion programs, and even more so they don’t know about how to counter them. Our study showed that more than 62% of respondents had never heard of such a threat, although 67% of surveyed users stated that they greatly value their data, which is precisely the main goal of such programs.



Backup, which is the easiest and most effective tool to combat data loss, can help in case of ransomware attacks. Despite the activity of cybercriminals, backup solutions are actively developing and acquiring new features. For example, in 2017, we began to implement Acronis Active Protection technology, which detects suspicious activity on computers and prevents malware from destroying user data, their backup copies, as well as disrupting our solution. The technology is based on behavioral heuristics that detect suspicious activity and prevent attacks from ransomware programs. This approach, together with integrated backup functionality, allows you to restore an unlimited number of files regardless of their size.

Summing up, we would like to give some simple tips that will help protect your data, regardless of where and how it is stored:

• Always back up your important data. At the same time, try to simultaneously store backup copies in local and in cloud storages;
  
  
• Regularly update your operating system and software to quickly fix security gaps through which malicious programs penetrate;
  
  
• Be careful of suspicious emails, links and attachments, as noted above, this is how extortionists infiltrate your system;
  
  
• Be sure to install modern antiviruses on your computer and turn on its automatic update.

In conclusion, we would like to wish everyone to prepare in advance for Saturday's sweepstakes, make a backup of their data on March 31 and not stay the first of April in the cold!