Understand how ransomware attacks work and what steps you can take to prevent, detect, and recover from them. Our ransomware protection articles cover backup strategies, network segmentation, incident response planning, and the latest defenses against evolving ransomware variants.
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The Breach That Bankrupted a 40-Person Company In 2023, a small accounting firm in Sacramento lost every client record it had. An employee clicked a link in what looked like a DocuSign notification. Within 72 hours, the ransomware encrypted everything — backups included. The firm closed its doors three months later.
In November 2023, the international law firm Allen & Overy confirmed it was hit by a LockBit ransomware attack. Weeks earlier, a midsize firm in the southeastern U.S. paid a seven-figure ransom after a threat actor encrypted every client file on its network — and the firm never made headlines
In 2023, the FBI's IC3 received over 880,000 cybercrime complaints with losses exceeding $12.5 billion — and a massive chunk of those victims were everyday people sitting at home computers. Not Fortune 500 companies. Not government agencies. Regular people who thought their home setup was too small
In 2024, the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center received over 859,000 complaints with losses exceeding $16.6 billion — a 33% increase from the year before. That number isn't slowing down in 2026. I've spent years watching organizations and individuals make the same preventable
One Click Cost MGM Resorts $100 Million In September 2023, a threat actor called Scattered Spider called the MGM Resorts help desk, impersonated an employee found on LinkedIn, and convinced IT staff to reset credentials. The result: ten days of operational chaos, encrypted systems, and an estimated $100 million in
The Breach That Started With a Single Password In 2023, MGM Resorts lost an estimated $100 million after a threat actor social-engineered a help desk employee with a ten-minute phone call. The attackers didn't exploit some exotic zero-day vulnerability. They used basic social engineering — information scraped from LinkedIn
A Single Home Router Opened the Door to a $4.88M Breach In 2024, IBM's Cost of a Data Breach Report pegged the global average breach cost at $4.88 million — the highest ever recorded. A significant chunk of those breaches involved remote workers. That number isn'
The Breach That Cost a Children's Charity Everything In 2023, Save the Children Federation disclosed it had been hit by the BianLian ransomware gang, which claimed to have stolen nearly 7 GB of sensitive data including financial records, medical information, and personal data. A global nonprofit with significant
A Single Click Cost One Hospital Chain $100 Million In 2024, Change Healthcare — the payment processing backbone of the U.S. healthcare system — was crippled by a ransomware attack attributed to the ALPHV/BlackCat group. UnitedHealth Group, its parent company, disclosed the incident would cost over $870 million in direct
A $9.5 Billion Problem That Keeps Getting Worse The FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) reported $12.5 billion in cybercrime losses in 2023 — a figure that's only climbed since. If you're searching for answers about cyber security, you're asking the
