Not even a full week. That’s how long we had between a glimmer of good news and a fresh slap of reality. Just a few days ago, security analysts were celebrating. Ransomware payments, they said, were down. A win! Maybe the cyber crooks were finally getting bored. Maybe the tide was turning.
And then the FBI dropped the hammer.
A fresh report revealed a 9% increase in ransomware attacks on U.S. critical infrastructure. And just to make sure the punch landed, the IC3 followed it up with a real kicker: $16.6 billion in cyber and scam-related losses reported in 2024—a 33% jump from the year before.
Let that sink in. Sixteen. Billion. Dollars. Gone. Wired away. Encrypted. Ransomed. Lost.
So no, the tide hasn’t turned. The attackers haven’t slowed down. The only thing going down is your chance of surviving one of these attacks if you’re still treating cybersecurity like an IT line item.
Let Me Tell You a Story…
There’s a business owner I know—we’ll call him Tom.
Tom ran a successful distribution company. Thirty employees. Good margins. A business built the hard way—over decades. He had backups, insurance, and an “IT guy” who checked the boxes. What didn’t he have? Documentation.
When his accounting system got encrypted, Tom called his cyber insurer.
They denied the claim.
Why? Because they said his MFA wasn’t enforced consistently. He said, “That’s not true. We had MFA.”
Their response?
“Prove it.”
He couldn’t.
So, he called his MFA vendor. They said, “We sent you the policy.”
The insurer came back with, “Great, but did they verify enforcement? Can we see the evidence you had a third-party assessment?”
Tom’s silence said it all.
Now he’s in arbitration, his business in slowly recovering (very slowly), and the settlement offer on the table is less than his legal bills.
That’s how fast it happens. That’s how it ends when you can’t prove the steps you took to protect your business.
Here’s the Hard Truth
You’re not being judged on whether you tried.
You’re being judged on whether you can prove it.
- Did you have a layered defense—or just a firewall you assumed was working?
- Are your employees trained to spot phishing—or do you just hope they are?
- Can you tie your security stack and decisions to an actual standard—or is it all just “best practice” guesswork?
- Do you have documentation that shows what you’ve implemented and why—or are you banking on memory?
If the answer to any of those is a shrug, you’re walking into a courtroom unarmed and unprotected.
Defense in Depth Isn’t Optional Anymore
This isn’t 2015. This isn’t about installing antivirus and sleeping well at night.
This is about survival.
If ransomware hits you tomorrow, will your backups hold up? Will your team know what to do? Will your tools even fire off an alert? Or will you be standing there with nothing but a gut feeling that you did the right thing?
That doesn’t hold up in front of a judge and jury.
Here’s what does:
- Documented security standards.
- Risk acceptance forms with client signatures.
- Proof of training.
- Logs.
- Audit trails.
Not sexy. But absolutely essential.
Not Sure Where You Stand?
Wondering if your tools would hold the line when the attacks start?
Wondering if you have the evidence to keep yourself out of court?
We’ve built a Cyber Liability Assessment for exactly this reason. It’s fast. It’s thorough. It doesn’t slow down your team—but it shows you exactly where you’re exposed.
You don’t need another compliance binder.
You need a system that proves your business did the right thing—before anyone else gets the chance to say you didn’t.
Because when the ransomware hits, you’re not the victim. You’re the defendant.
