According to Verizon’s Data Breach Investigations Report 2024, approximately one third of all breaches that contributing organizations investigated in 2023 involved ransomware or another extortion technique. Combined with pure extortion attacks, 32% of breaches were attributed to these techniques, making it a top threat across 92% of industries in the study.
Read on to learn more about the impact this kind of cyber attack can have on small businesses like yours—and learn how to protect against ransomware attacks on your organization.
The True Cost of Ransomware
Ransomware attacks infect a target device—often a computer or smartphone—and encrypt the contents. Then, the attackers offer to decrypt the data in exchange for a ransom payment. Whether or not they stick to their word when the ransom is paid, however, is entirely up to them. .
According to Statistia, more than 72% of businesses worldwide were affected by ransomware attacks as of 2023. According to law firm Fisher Phillips, that same year saw businesses handing over $1 billion to criminals to unlock ransomed data and devices. It’s no surprise that this sort of impact has made ransomware a favorite tactic in both cybercrime and organized crime circles.
Downtime
Ransomware can cripple any organization, and the impact spreads beyond desktops, laptops, and mobile phones in office environments. Businesses reported widespread disruption to its operations in 2023 as a result of a ransomware attack, which had a knock-on effect on product and service availability. The impact of ransomware can be far reaching beyond just the business itself, even extending to customers and commercial partners.
Damage to Reputation
If your small business falls victim to a ransomware attack, it will harm your company’s reputation with customers and investors, in addition to other potential fallout. This can include but isn’t limited to loss of sales, employee layoffs, brand damage, and business closure.
It’s also worth noting that ransomware incidents at peer organizations or organizations that are in the same supply chain as yours can be damaging to your business, too.
Legal Costs and Impacts
Shareholder and customer class action lawsuits due to ransomware incidents or data breaches are commonplace. Action from regulators and law enforcement is also increasing. There’s a high legal cost involved in defending your organization and personnel against lawsuits, be they from regulators, shareholders, private individuals, or supply chain partners. Even if your defense is successful and you can recover costs from the other party or your insurer, it’s an additional distraction and burden for your organization’s leadership and staff.
Remediation
Recovering from a successful attack can also be costly. Backup vendor Carbonite cites costs of $100-$250 per hour for remediation, with basic remediation activities taking anywhere from a few hours to five working days for remediation per system.
Practical Steps Your Small Business Can Take for Ransomware Attack Prevention
Prevention is better than cure, and this is definitely the case when dealing with ransomware. We’re going to run through ten straightforward steps you can implement to reduce your organization’s risk exposure when it comes to Ransomware attacks. Think of these suggestions like swiss cheese: each of these steps is like its own slice of cheese with its own gaps and holes—but layer them together and the holes in one slice are covered by a different one, keeping you more protected against attack.
1. Security Awareness Training
The number one source of compromise for any organization is an employee clicking on a link they shouldn’t in an email. Social engineering—a fancy term for conning people into handing over information or granting access to things they shouldn’t—is incredibly effective and very hard to defend against. That said, providing security awareness training with regular updates to show people how to spot such scans is effective. It’ll never be 100% safe, of course: people can be confused, in a hurry, eager to please or curious, and all of these are solid reasons why social engineering attacks can work.
2. Back Up Your Data
A surefire way to defeat ransomware is to backup key systems and storage often, and store it according to a defined backup regime. If key systems or data are encrypted by an attacker and held to ransom, then recovering from a backup will get around the problem with ease—and hopefully, with minimal loss of production data or other key information.
There are two important caveats to this, however. First, it’s vital to test and verify these backups as frequently as possible. There’s no worse feeling than needing to restore from a backup and finding you have several terabytes of corrupted data, or that your backup never worked in the first place.
Secondly, ransomware attacks now also often involve the exfiltration of sensitive data. Sure, you can recover from a backup—but the attacker also has a copy of your data, and depending on how sensitive it is, leaking this to the internet or selling it on the dark web can be catastrophic.
3. Keep All Systems And Software Updated
One of the highest-profile ransomware attacks of recent years, WannaCry, was spread by and targeted unpatched Windows systems. Regular and preferably automated patching and updates on company systems will further reduce the effectiveness of many attacks and data breaches, and make it harder for attackers to breach your defenses.
4. Install Antivirus Software & Firewalls
Make use of reliable antivirus (AV) and anti-malware tools to protect your estate. Even the cheapest free-as-in-bundled AVs from vendors is better than nothing, but a targeted purchase on your part, informed by knowledge and understanding of your organization’s specific risk profile and security needs, will be even more effective.
5. Network Segmentation
Dividing your network into chunks and granting access based on need has several beneficial effects, but a key one is that it will limit the spread of ransomware, especially automated or low-effort attacks.
6. Email Protection
Closely linked to the first point about training your employees to spot suspicious communications, email protection done correctly can flag suspicious links and warn of suspect emails, senders or spoofing attempts. By storing sensitive data in more secure segments of your network and restricting access to it, you can reduce risk further.
7. Application Whitelisting
Very few organizations need to allow completely open access to applications across their networks or on their endpoints. Given free rein to install any apps they like, users will happily install games, download utilities from less-than-reliable sources or try and run pirated apps that may or may not be what they say they are. If these applications contain malicious payloads or are downloaded from the wrong sites, they represent attack vectors. On top of that, applications that are legitimate but insecure represent further risks. Limiting the number and type of applications that can run on your estate reduces your risk significantly.
8. Endpoint Security
Use of Endpoint Protection (EPP) or Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) tooling allows your organization’s security team or managed service provider to keep tabs on the devices in your business that are used to access, store, and transport valuable data. Understanding what each node in a network is up to— whether it’s a smartphone, laptop, service, or network switch—and isolating it if it starts behaving suspiciously, allows potential attacks to be identified and dealt with promptly.
9. Limit User Access Privileges
In tandem with network segmentation, limiting users’ access to only the systems, files, data and applications they need to do their jobs is critical. This should be done on the principle of least privilege (sometimes abbreviated to PoLP) rather than on seniority or any other basis.
10. Run Regular Security Testing
The final piece of advice is to regularly test the security of your systems and the awareness of your people to potential threats. This doesn’t have to be in the form of a full Red Team exercise— there are many other, less expensive and more effective steps to take before most organizations need to consider that option.
Conclusion
Ransomware attack prevention is about reducing the risk of an incident down to a level appropriate for your business. The correct mindset, approaches, tools, and techniques will remove significant amounts of risk—but they won’t eliminate it.
When you should start dedicating resources to preventing ransomware incidents will depend on the needs of your organization. Nevertheless, the ten tips above, when implemented together, will be more than enough to start you on the path to defending your organization against ransomware.
Protect Your Business Today
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