Some Australians are turning a blind eye to their computer safety – even despite highly publicised cyber attacks, according to a survey from Acronis.

The global poll was conducted on the general internet population from Australia, Japan, Germany, the US, U.K, Germany, France and Spain in August.

The survey found that 46.5% of respondents do not back up their computers – possibly because 67.8% have never lost important photos or files from a computer or mobile device.

41.7% of Australian respondents do not know what ransomware is; and 10.8% of Australian respondents believe that ransomware will not affect them.

45.3% believe that they know how to protect their devices from ransomware.

The survey also hints that Australians are wary about ransom demands. 80.2% said they would be willing to pay less than $50 to get their files back after data loss or ransomware; while 3.2% would pay more than $1000.

“This survey illustrates why ransomware criminals enjoy such a huge success attacking people's computers. People who never heard of ransomware so far may be the targets for the future attacks, which is half the respondents to our survey,” comments Gaidar Magdanurov, Acronis VP Consumer and Small Business.

Globally, 56.7% of respondents admit they don't back up computers even though 35.1% had experienced data loss.

Half (50.7%) of all respondents say they do not know what ransomware is and 81.5% would pay less than $50 to get their files back.

According to Acronis, there may be a gradual awareness about ransomware, even though half of respondents do not know what it is.

The company conducted a similar survey in March, which found that 62.2% of respondents had never heard of ransomware, compared to August's responses of 50.7%.

The March survey found that respondents were most concerned about losing personal information and documents (35%) and pictures/video/music (32.2%).

Amongst users who did back up their information, the March survey showed that 33.3% of respondents backed up to an external drive, compared to 19.7% to the cloud. 20.1% did a combination of both.

Users cited security as the most important feature when backing up data (26.6%), followed by ease of use and storage capacity (17.2% each), and privacy (11.8%).

“Backup still remains the most effective vaccine against data loss. Creating a backup before disaster strikes is much more efficient and cost effective than looking for a cure when your data is lost.  Affordable backup software is readily available, so there is no excuse for losing your data or exposing it to cyber criminals and ransomware attacks,” concludes Acronis CMO John Zanni.