Protect your business from ransomware: prevention, detection, response, recovery.

No. Modern ransomware groups bypass legacy AV routinely. Antivirus is one layer in a multi-layered defense; alone, it leaves you exposed at the email vector, the credential-theft vector, the lateral-movement phase, and the backup-deletion phase. Layered defense is the minimum bar, and it is also what cyber insurance underwriters now expect to see.

It is scoped per engagement against your size and risk profile, and it is a small fraction of what an incident costs. Real ransomware incidents carry ransom pressure, recovery labor, business interruption, legal and notification costs, and reputational harm, and the total routinely dwarfs years of defensive spend. We provide a custom quote after the readiness audit, when the actual gap list is known.

That is an incident response engagement, and speed matters more than anything else. Contact us immediately and mark it urgent; emergency engagement starts remotely the same day, which is how containment actually happens: tenant-level isolation, credential resets, and endpoint containment executed over secure remote access. Then forensic preservation, recovery from backups, and coordination with your breach counsel and insurer. Whether to pay is your call, made with counsel; our advice is no unless backups have failed.

6-10 weeks for a comprehensive foundation build. The most exploitable gaps close in the first three weeks (MFA enforcement, EDR deployment, immutable backup). Sentinel monitoring is operational by roughly week six, and the IR playbook and first tabletop land by week eight. Ongoing operations run from week ten.

Directly. Underwriters ask about specific controls by name: EDR coverage, MFA enforcement, immutable or offline backups, a tested incident response plan, and security awareness training. This engagement implements those controls and produces the evidence pack the application and any follow-up questionnaire ask for. Better answers on those questions generally mean better terms, though pricing decisions belong to your carrier and broker.

Defender XDR (Defender for Endpoint, Office 365, Identity, and Cloud Apps) is enterprise-grade and is what we deploy as the default. It compares well with third-party EDR platforms and integrates natively with the rest of the Microsoft stack, which most US businesses already license in part. Third-party tools have specific niches, but Defender is the right baseline for most mid-market environments.

Immutable backup is specifically designed to survive this. Backups are stored off-site under a write-once-read-many policy with separate authentication, isolated from your production identity plane. A ransomware group cannot encrypt or delete them even with full domain admin on your primary environment. Quarterly restore tests verify the model actually works.

Our strong recommendation is no. Paying funds further criminal activity, marks you as a willing target for repeat attacks, and does not guarantee decryption. Payments can also create sanctions exposure where the recipient is a sanctioned entity, which is a determination for your counsel, and many carriers require their consent before any payment. Our defense design prioritizes recovery without paying; if backups have failed and pressure is extreme, we coordinate specialist negotiators and law enforcement with your counsel.

Possibly, and it is a legal determination, not a technical one. Every US state has a breach notification statute, HIPAA adds obligations for covered entities, and public companies carry SEC disclosure duties for material incidents. Our role is establishing the technical facts fast: what was accessed, when, and whose data. Your breach counsel makes the notification calls on those facts.

Sometimes it is, and it is worth checking your scope document. In practice most MSP contracts cover devices, patching, and user support, and stop short of the disciplines on this page: EDR policy tuning, SIEM detection engineering, immutable backup with tested restores, a rehearsed IR playbook, and phishing simulation. Ask your provider for the date of your last restore test and your last tabletop; the answers tell you whether you are covered. We can run this program alongside an incumbent MSP with written swim lanes.