Jean-Pierre Boushira, Vice President South Region at Veritas Technologies, comments on the growing awareness among consumers of the theft of their data when companies have suffered a successful ransomware attack.

"In recent months, consumer data has been more coveted than ever by hackers, and no one is immune. Anyone can learn from an article or an email that their data has been stolen during an attack on an employer, a company that has been entrusted with the data, or a public institution. Of course, any entity that is even remotely responsible will inform consumers about the circumstances of the attack, the solutions it wishes to provide to the problem and the consequences that will ensue. But are consumers really aware of the consequences of such attacks at their own level?

Some consumers may not feel concerned, believing that their information will be of little interest to hackers or that it will be drowned among dozens of stolen gigabytes. Others will think that they will fall through the cracks, that it is just their first and last names and that it will have little impact. Yet we could not be further from the truth. Fortunately, a growing proportion of consumers seem to be aware of the risks they and their data are running, and that the threat of ransomwares (to mention only this one) is beautiful and very real.

On closer inspection, some citizens strongly condemn companies that are victims of ransomware attacks and even go so far as to consider that management is primarily responsible for the non-protection of the data held by the entity in question. Our survey of consumers, conducted last June, shows that they take the subject very seriously and that they consider it legitimate for companies to do the same: 79% of those questioned said that companies should implement effective protection software to protect the data in their possession. On the other hand, 62% consider that making back-up copies of their data could be an adequate solution to ensure its security.

Awareness of the growing threat of attacks is on the rise. However, many efforts still need to be made and experts, both in data and security, need more than ever to be pedagogical and focus on prevention. The democratisation of good reflexes and habits will help consumers not only to protect themselves from certain attacks (phishing, etc.) but also to adopt the right behaviour in the event of an attack: alerting the competent IT services, determining the circumstances of the attack and limiting its spread as much as possible. In the end, by adopting the right gestures in terms of data culture and cybersecurity, they will no longer be subjects but actors of data protection".

Source : globalsecuritymag.fr

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