Beyond prevention: Ransomware resilience for financial services:
Five best practices to help strengthen ransomware readiness, limit disruption, and restore operations faster
Ransomware is accelerating in financial services, and prevention alone isn’t enough. SHI and Cohesity outline five best practices to help security leaders strengthen ransomware readiness, limit disruption, and recover quickly.
Ransomware has become a high-stakes crisis for the financial sector, which faces the highest median ransomware demands of any industry at $3 million.
Threat actors are weaponizing AI to move at machine speed, outpacing traditional defenses. Instead of breaking in with malware, they’re logging in with valid credentials, hijacking trusted identities, and abusing legitimate system tools to blend in and navigate environments.
The momentum is undeniable. According to Black Kite’s 2026 Financial Services Report, 65 finance-sector incidents were recorded in Q1 2026 alone, a 76 percent increase over Q1 2025.
As attacks become faster and more scalable, the challenge is no longer stopping every threat. It’s building resilient systems that can withstand continuous pressure and recover quickly when an incident occurs.
Many financial services organizations feel prepared, but most aren’t as ready as they think. In CrowdStrike’s State of Ransomware Survey, 52 percent of senior IT and cybersecurity decision-makers in financial services rated themselves “very well-prepared.” Of those that were hit, only 38 percent recovered within 24 hours.
Beyond prevention: Ransomware resilience for financial services, a new ebook from SHI and Cohesity, offers a practical guide to ransomware readiness and rapid recovery. It details five best practices that balance people, process, and technology:
- Assess your current state across identity, backup, data classification, network segmentation, and more.
- Establish a secure recovery zone with an isolated clean room and a minimum viable recovery environment (MVRE).
- Transition to active defenses, including AI-driven threat detection at the storage layer.
- Stop treating resilience like an IT problem by involving cross-functional leadership in planning.
- Run continuous recovery simulations to validate readiness.
The ebook also shows how SHI and Cohesity help financial services organizations put these practices to work.
Building cyber resilience is an iterative process that’s different for every organization. The ebook details key action items that can help set you on the right path. Download it to learn how a proactive, multi-layered approach can improve both technical and business outcomes.
shi_cohesity_ebookNEXT STEPS
Scroll down to read the full ebook.
Speak with an SHI expert to map out a security approach aligned with your goals.
Learn more about the SHI and Cohesity partnership.
Speak to an SHI expert
-
Third-party risk in the AI era: Why traditional approaches fall short:
How AI is expanding the digital supply chain, and what modern TPRM requiresReading Time: 9 minutesAI has blurred the lines of traditional third-party risk management. Discover what counts as a third party today and how to move from periodic assessments to continuous visibility.
Read More -
Defense in depth in the AI era: 6 lessons from SHI Fall Summit:
How security leaders can build more resilient organizationsReading Time: 9 minutesSecurity leaders are being asked to do more, faster, with less. Learn how to reduce blind spots, strengthen resilience, and keep pace with a changing technology landscape.
Read More -
The OpenAI-Hugging Face incident: Lessons from Black Hat 2026:
Defending against the next generation of autonomous threatsReading Time: 9 minutesExplore Black Hat insights and learn how to defend your organization against the next generation of threats.
Read More
