Ransomware Gangs Are Now Targeting Your Backups First — Here's What That Means for UK SMBs

There's an assumption buried in most backup strategies: that if ransomware hits, you restore from backup and carry on. It's a reasonable assumption. It's also increasingly wrong.

Ransomware gangs have changed how they work. They're no longer smashing and grabbing. They're getting inside a network, staying quiet, and spending weeks — sometimes longer — finding and destroying your recovery options before they trigger any encryption. By the time the ransom note appears, your backups may already be gone.

This isn't a theoretical risk. According to recent threat intelligence, backup infrastructure was compromised in 73% of ransomware incidents recorded in 2026. If you're running a backup strategy that hasn't been designed with this in mind, it's worth understanding exactly what's changed — and why.

The Playbook Has Changed

The old ransomware model was blunt: get in, encrypt everything, demand payment. The new model is more patient and considerably more effective.

Attackers now treat backup destruction as a pre-attack priority. On average, they spend around 21 days inside a network before deploying their encryption payload. During that time, they're not sitting idle — they're mapping your environment, escalating privileges, and locating your recovery infrastructure. When they find it, they delete it.

They know where to look. Cloud-hosted recovery points, local shadow copies, backup catalogues — all of it gets wiped using compromised admin credentials before a ransom note ever appears. By the time you know you've been hit, your options are already gone.

A backup that can be reached and deleted by the same credentials an attacker would compromise is not a backup. It's a false sense of security.

The UK Threat Picture Is Getting Worse

UK organisations are absorbing around 1,589 cyber attacks per week — a 34% year-on-year increase, running at roughly double the global average. SMEs account for more than half of all reported ransomware incidents in the UK.

This matters because smaller businesses are often targeted precisely because their defences are thinner. They're less likely to have security operations teams watching for unusual behaviour. They're more likely to have backups stored in the same environment as production data, accessible via the same credentials. That makes them easier targets for the kind of patient, reconnaissance-heavy attacks that have become standard practice.

Being small doesn't make you less of a target. In many cases, it makes you more of one.

Paying the Ransom Won't Save Your Data Either

There's another shift worth understanding. Double extortion — where attackers exfiltrate your data before encrypting it — is now the default, not an occasional tactic. In Q1 2026, 96% of ransomware incidents involved data theft alongside or instead of encryption.

What this means in practice: even if you restore perfectly from backup, the data is already out. And under UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018, that matters. Exfiltration alone triggers the same breach notification obligations as a full encryption event. You're looking at reporting to the ICO within 72 hours, potential fines, and — depending on the nature of the data — notifying affected individuals.

A clean restore is still far better than paying a ransom. But it doesn't make the legal exposure disappear.

What Actually Protects You

The honest answer is architectural separation.

Immutable backups — ones that cannot be modified or deleted after they're written, by anyone — change the equation entirely. So does genuine isolation: backups stored in an environment that is not accessible via the same credentials or network paths as your production systems.

If an attacker compromises your admin accounts and your backup system is reachable through those same accounts, they can destroy your backups. If your backups are isolated and immutable, they cannot. That's the difference between an incident that costs you days and one that costs you months — or your business.

Equally important is testing. A backup that has never been restored from is a backup you're taking on faith. Regular, documented recovery tests are what give you actual confidence that you can recover, rather than an assumption that you probably can.

Most backup strategies in use at UK SMBs today were designed around a different threat. They weren't built to survive a patient attacker who already knows where your recovery infrastructure lives. That's not a criticism — it's just that the threat has moved faster than most organisations have had the capacity to respond to.

This Is Worth Reviewing Now

If you're not certain whether your backups are genuinely isolated from your production environment, or whether an attacker with compromised credentials could reach and delete them, it's worth finding out. That's not a difficult question to answer — but it is an important one.

The businesses that come out of ransomware incidents with the least damage aren't the ones that got lucky. They're the ones that had recovery infrastructure an attacker couldn't reach.

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Talk to IronFell about whether your backup strategy would survive a targeted attack — no jargon, no hard sell. We work with UK SMBs and mid-market businesses to make sure recovery is actually possible when it matters most. Get in touch with IronFell DPS.