Ransomware Hit Over Two-Thirds of Financial Services Firms in 2024: 5 Steps to Ensure Your Firm Can Recover from an Attack

For IT and security leaders at financial services firms, cybersecurity is top of mind these days. And for good reasons. Sophos’ The State of Ransomware 2024 found that 65 percent of financial services organizations were hit by ransomware in 2024. It gets worse: 90 percent of respondents who were hit by ransomware in the past year said that cybercriminals tried to compromise their backups during the attacks. Just under half of those attempts—48 percent—resulted in data encryption.

The good news is that this is a significant drop from the 81 percent encryption rate noted in Sophos’ 2023 report. Still, the report found that recovering from a ransomware attack cost financial services firms $2.58 million. These costs make the case for financial services firms to heighten their data protection efforts, implement robust policies and processes, and invest in solutions that ensure recovery.

Ransomware Threats Drive Financial Services Cybersecurity and Data Protection

Protecting your firm from the increasing risks of ransomware requires that you understand the tactics cybercriminals are using. More sophisticated attacks, many driven by “ransomware as a service” organizations like Eldorado, which first appeared in March 2024, offer solo hackers and groups easy access to malicious tools. 

Eldorado uses double extortion: Your data is encrypted, and the hackers threaten to leak sensitive financial information if the ransom isn’t paid. Given that your financial services firm holds a tremendous amount of client data, a breach of this kind can be incredibly costly in dollars and damage your reputation. 

Any ransomware can have a considerable impact on your financial services firm. In June of this year, Patelco—a credit union with over $9 billion in assets and 450,000 members nationwide—was hit by a ransomware attackthat forced it to shut its systems down and locked its members out of electronic payments, direct deposits, and transfers. Even worse, the firm now faces two class-action lawsuits for failing to protect customer data.

Ensuring Ransomware Recovery with a 5-Step Multilayered Strategy 

As the Sophos report notes, your backups are a primary target for hackers because they know that will prevent your recovery and make you more likely to pay the ransom. That’s why simply having a backup solution in place isn’t enough for financial services firms. You need a multilayered data protection strategy. With that in mind, here are five steps for implementing ransomware protection strategies and ensuring recovery:

Step 1: Implement the 3-2-1-1 Backup Strategy

Arcserve strongly advocates the 3-2-1-1 backup strategy because it works. The strategy involves keeping three copies of your data on two different storage types, with one copy kept offsite and the final “1” representing immutability. Backups kept in immutable storage are saved in a write-once-read-many (WORM) format that unauthorized users can’t alter or delete. So, you can be certain that—even if your primary and secondary backups are compromised—you have a secure, unaltered version of your data you can use for recovery.

Step 2: Tighten Backup Security

Protect your backups with encryption and limit access using multi-factor authentication (MFA). Limit the number of admins with access to your backup environments as much as possible, and regularly audit these permissions to ensure they aren’t being misused.

Step 3: Test Your Disaster Recovery Plans Regularly

Having a backup and disaster recovery plan in place isn’t enough. You must test your plans to ensure they will work as expected when an actual disaster strikes. This includes running simulated ransomware attack scenarios to ensure you can restore data quickly and efficiently—without paying a ransom.

Step 4: Use Advanced Threat Detection Tools

Deploying real-time monitoring and threat detection tools can identify and block suspicious activity before it impacts your systems. Look for cybersecurity solutions that employ machine learning and other advanced technologies to detect ransomware signatures, unusual user behavior, and abnormal file changes that may indicate that an attack is underway.

Step 5: Educate Your Employees

Phishing is the most common cyberattack vector, with an estimated 3.4 billion spam emails sent every day. Regularly educating your employees on recognizing phishing attempts and other suspicious activities can substantially reduce the risk of ransomware infecting your networks. Train your people to understand the importance of verifying email addresses, avoid suspicious links and attachments, and report potential threats to your security team.

Build a Multilayered Defense With Arcserve UDP

Arcserve Unified Data Protection (UDP) software delivers all-in-one data protection that helps your financial services firm comprehensively retain, back up, and restore your data. Arcserve UDP protects against data loss and extended downtime across cloud, local, hyperconverged, and SaaS-based workloads. The solution reduces downtime from days to minutes and validates recovery time and recovery point objectives (RTOs/RPOs) and service-level agreements (SLAs) with automated testing and granular reporting.

The software deploys in minutes and doesn’t require extensive training or costly professional services. And you can enjoy management flexibility with either a multitenant, cloud-based management console or a private management console.

To learn more about Arcserve UDP, request a demo.