By STS Consulting Group | Reading time: 8 minutes
The email looked legitimate. An invoice from a vendor your accounts payable team recognized. One click, and within hours, your entire file server was encrypted. The ransom demand: $500,000 in Bitcoin. Your backups? Encrypted too—they were on the same network.
This scenario plays out at mid-sized companies every day. Attackers have realized that smaller organizations often lack enterprise-grade security but have enough money to pay significant ransoms. You're the sweet spot.
Here's how to protect yourself.
Understanding the Threat
Modern ransomware isn't some teenager in a basement. It's sophisticated criminal enterprises with customer service departments, negotiation teams, and business models. They research their targets. They time their attacks for maximum impact. They know what you can afford to pay.
Common entry points include phishing emails with malicious attachments or links, compromised credentials (often purchased from previous breaches), unpatched software vulnerabilities, and exposed remote access services.
Once inside, attackers often spend days or weeks moving laterally through your network, escalating privileges, and identifying your most critical systems. The encryption happens only after they've positioned themselves for maximum damage.
Prevention: Your First Line of Defense
Email Security: Most ransomware enters through email. Implement advanced email filtering that scans attachments and links. Train employees to recognize phishing—and test them regularly. Make reporting suspicious emails easy and celebrated, not punished.
Credential Protection: Enforce multi-factor authentication on everything possible—email, VPN, cloud services, administrative access. Use a password manager to eliminate password reuse. Monitor for your company's credentials appearing in breach databases.
Patch Management: Keep systems updated. Yes, patching is disruptive. Ransomware is more disruptive. Prioritize patches for internet-facing systems and known exploited vulnerabilities.
Network Segmentation: Don't let an attacker who compromises one system access everything. Segment your network so that critical systems are isolated. The accounting department doesn't need direct access to production servers.
Endpoint Protection: Modern endpoint detection and response (EDR) tools can identify and stop ransomware behavior. They're not perfect, but they catch what traditional antivirus misses.
Backup: Your Last Line of Defense
If prevention fails, backups are what allow you to recover without paying ransom. But backups only help if they're done right:
Follow the 3-2-1 rule: Three copies of data, on two different media types, with one copy offsite (or offline). Cloud backups count as offsite, but they must be isolated so ransomware can't reach them.
Test your restores: Backups that haven't been tested aren't backups—they're hopes. Regularly verify that you can actually restore from your backups.
Know your recovery time: How long would it take to restore your critical systems? If the answer is 'we don't know,' find out before you need to do it for real.
Protect backup credentials: If attackers can access your backup systems with the same credentials they stole, they'll encrypt those too. Backup access should require separate, well-protected credentials.
Incident Response: When It Happens Anyway
Even with good defenses, breaches happen. Having a plan makes the difference between controlled response and chaos.
Have a documented plan: Who makes decisions? Who gets notified? What are the first steps? Document this when you're calm, not during a crisis.
Know your stakeholders: Legal counsel, cyber insurance carrier, law enforcement, PR/communications—know who to call and have contact information ready.
Practice: Tabletop exercises where you walk through a scenario reveal gaps in your plan. It's much better to find these gaps in practice than in reality.
Consider cyber insurance: The right policy can cover incident response costs, business interruption, and even ransom payments. But read the fine print—coverage often requires specific security controls to be in place.
The Pay or Not Pay Question
Should you pay the ransom? There's no universal answer. Payment funds criminal enterprises and provides no guarantee of recovery. But when the alternative is business failure, the ethical calculus gets complicated.
The best answer is to never face this question by having recovery options that don't depend on attacker cooperation. That means robust, tested, isolated backups and the capability to restore from them quickly.
How We Help
Our Cloud Security & Risk Reduction practice helps mid-sized companies build practical ransomware defenses. We assess your current exposure, implement appropriate controls, ensure your backup and recovery capabilities are robust, and help you develop and test incident response plans.
We focus on practical security that fits your budget and risk profile—not enterprise solutions scaled down, but right-sized protection that actually works.
Want to assess your ransomware readiness? Schedule a free consultation to discuss your security posture.