%20(800%20x%20200%20px).png)
If we don’t meet our promise, you don’t pay—simple as that. We help small businesses across Texas get fast, reliable IT support with a 99.4% client retention rate. Want to see if we’re a fit?
August 2026 was the worst month on record for ransomware. Tracking firm Comparitech logged 997 attacks worldwide, about 32 a day, a 23% jump from July and enough to break the previous monthly record set back in February 2025. Healthcare attacks rose 30%. Utility attacks doubled. Law firms, tech companies, and financial firms all saw sharp increases. Two groups, Qilin and The Gentlemen, were behind more than a quarter of all attacks between them.
That's the headline. Here's the part that should actually change how businesses plan: a new CrowdStrike survey of over 1,100 security leaders found that paying the ransom barely helps. 93% of organizations that paid still suffered a data breach anyway. 45% of them couldn't even recover all of their encrypted files after paying. And 82% were hit by another attack shortly after complying with the first one.
Paying isn't a reset button. It's often just the first installment.
Here's a number worth sitting with: half of the organizations in that CrowdStrike survey rated themselves “very well prepared” for a ransomware attack before one actually happened. Of that confident half, only 22% recovered within 24 hours, and 42% experienced significant operational downtime anyway.
Feeling prepared and being prepared turned out to be two very different things. That gap is exactly where businesses get hurt not because nobody thought about ransomware, but because the plan nobody tested didn't hold up the one time it mattered.
Why recovery plans fail once the attack actually happens
A separate report from recovery firm Fenix24, based on more than 500 real ransomware recoveries, found the same pattern over and over. Only 4 of more than 800 clients came anywhere close to their own 24–48 hour recovery targets, and even then, only for partial operations. Not one organization regained full operational capacity in under several weeks.
The biggest reason: Active Directory, the system that controls who can log in and access what, was almost always the first thing attackers seized. And 94% of the organizations Fenix24 studied had tied their backup systems to that same directory. Once the attacker owned identity and access, the backups meant to save them were compromised right along with everything else. 99.2% had no documented plan for recovering identity systems specifically, and the few that did have a plan found it didn't survive contact with a real attack.
Even when backups did survive intact, in 38% of those cases they still couldn't actually be used for recovery outdated, corrupted, in the wrong format, or simply too slow to restore at the scale the business needed.
None of this is really about having backups or not having backups anymore. Nearly everyone has backups. The businesses that recover in days instead of weeks are the ones who can answer much harder questions:
If any of those questions give you pause, that's useful information better to have it now than during an actual incident, when 32 other businesses a day are learning the same lesson the hard way.
Surviving ransomware isn't about hoping it doesn't happen to you; it's about building recovery into the way your systems are architected from the start: backups that are genuinely isolated from the systems most likely to be compromised, network segmentation that limits how far an attacker can spread, and a tested incident response plan that holds up under real pressure. Cynergy Information Technology helps businesses put that foundation in place before they need it. Reach out to Cynergy IT to find out how your current backup and recovery setup would actually hold up.
If we don’t meet our promise, you don’t pay—simple as that. We help small businesses across Texas get fast, reliable IT support with a 99.4% client retention rate. Want to see if we’re a fit?