Numbers and facts from the Acronis Cyber Threats Report 1st six months 2021

In order to effectively protect the sensitive data of companies and end users from cyber attacks, continuous observation of and research on the global threat is of essential importance. With the aid of such a global radar screen, the strategies and tactics of new and known cyber-criminals, their attack targets and vectors as well as the malware variants used can be identified as quickly as possible and appropriate defence mechanisms deployed.

As the first and now leading supplier of a truly integrated cyber protection solution, that combines detection technology based on machine intelligence and behaviour analysis with high-performance backup and restore, Acronis has built up the infrastructure required for this in the form of a global network of Cyber Protection Operations Centres (CPOC) with over 250,000 end points constantly under surveillance.

The knowledge gained in the CPOC, that flows on an ongoing basis into the solutions in the Acronis Cyber Protect family that are aimed at various target groups (Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud for service providers, Acronis Cyber Protect for companies, Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office for end users) is published every six months in a Cyber Threats Report.

From the 2021 six-monthly report, which has been available for some time now, we would like to summarise the most important knowledge gained in this and a future series of blog posts, and give specific examples from the reporting period:

• The most important cyber security trends in the first half of 2021
• Why MSPs are increasingly the focus
• Malware statistics and the most important threat families
• Ransomware statistics and analyses
• Weaknesses particularly exposed
• Security recommendations

Criminals focusing on Germany
The fact that companies and end users in Germany should be particularly sensitive to such threats is clear from the five most important numbers that the report for the first six months of this year has assembled:

• In addition to the USA and UK, Germany is one of the top 3 global attack destinations
• The average costs of data compromise are around USD 3.56 million (€3.17 million)
• Ransoms rose by 33% to over USD 100,000 (€89,000)
• 80% of all companies recorded a cyber security compromise as a result of a weakness in their third-party eco-system
• On average Acronis blocks 393,000 URLs per month
• 94% of malware attacks take place via email – the occurrence of phishing emails increased between the first and second quarter by 62%

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