The international hotel chain Omni Hotels & Resorts has confirmed that a cyberattack last month saw it shut down its systems, with hackers stealing personal information about its customers.

In the aftermath of the attack, hotel guests reported that they had been forced to check in on paper, that room keys didn't work, and all phone systems and Wi-Fi were offline.

Any organisation that has tried to recover from a ransomware attack knows that it can be time-consuming and costly. Companies hit by an attack must choose between paying a ransom or recovering encrypted data from a backup.

Unfortunately, ransomware gangs are too aware that they can leverage significantly higher ransoms from their corporate victims if they have also compromise the company's backups. For this reason, we are seeing more and more cyber attacks targeting backups because they know that organisations desperately need them to recover if they want to avoid paying a ransom to cybercriminals.