Yes, probably more than you'd think. Verizon's 2026 Data Breach Investigations Report found that 88% of small business breaches now involve ransomware, and small businesses are targeted more often than large enterprises, not less. You're not too small to be worth attacking. You're actually closer to the ideal target, because attackers assume, correctly a lot of the time, that a small business has weaker defenses and a backup plan that's never actually been tested.
Why Small Businesses Get Targeted More Than Big Companies
The logic from an attacker's side is simple. Small businesses tend to have outdated systems, inconsistent patching, and no dedicated security staff, which makes them easier to get into than a large company with a full IT security team. At the same time, a small business often can't afford to be locked out of its own systems for even a few days, which makes it more likely to pay quickly rather than fight it out. That combination, easier to breach and more motivated to pay fast, is exactly what makes small operators attractive rather than beneath notice.
Why "We Have Backups" Doesn't Mean You're Safe From Double Extortion
This is the part that's changed the most and the part I think most small business owners haven't caught up on. The old ransomware playbook was simple: attackers locked your files and you paid to get the decryption key. If you had good backups, you could just restore your data and ignore the ransom demand entirely. That workaround doesn't fully work anymore. The large majority of ransomware incidents today include a second step, attackers steal a copy of your data before they ever encrypt it, then threaten to publish client records, financial data, or internal communications publicly even if you restore everything from backup. Having backups still matters enormously, but it no longer makes the threat disappear, it just removes one half of the leverage attackers are using against you.
The other detail worth knowing: attackers specifically go after your backups during an attack, because they know backups are the thing standing between you and paying. A backup that's sitting on the same network as everything else can get encrypted right along with your production files.
What Actually Stops Most of These Attacks
You don't need an enterprise security budget to meaningfully cut your risk. Three things do most of the real work: multi-factor authentication on every account that touches your business data, backups that are actually isolated from your main systems so an attacker can't reach and encrypt them in the same breach, and keeping your software and operating systems patched, since exploiting known, unpatched vulnerabilities is now the most common way attackers get in to begin with. None of that requires hiring a security firm. It requires turning on settings most software already has and picking a backup method that doesn't just live on the same drive or network as everything else.
Why I Think "Tested" Is the Word Everyone Skips
Here's my actual gripe with how this gets talked about. Everyone says "have backups," and almost nobody says "and actually restore from them at least once to confirm they work." A backup you've never tested is a hope, not a plan. I've seen business owners assume their cloud storage sync counts as a real backup, when it's really just a live copy that ransomware can encrypt right alongside the original. A real backup is isolated, meaning an attack on your main system can't reach it, and it's tested, meaning you've actually confirmed you can get your files back from it before you're relying on that under pressure. Businesses with backups they'd actually verified were far more likely to refuse paying a ransom entirely, because they had a real alternative instead of a theoretical one.
What to Check on Your Backup This Week
Pick your most important business files, client records, invoices, whatever you genuinely could not operate without, and actually restore a copy from your backup to confirm it works, today, not someday. If you can't do that in under fifteen minutes, your backup isn't protecting you the way you think it is, and that's worth fixing before you need it, not after.
