"If the public and the private sectors can continue to galvanize as a group effort to help businesses, we can continue to improve our ability to recover quickly and gather intelligence to protect others or even potentially hold those conducting these attacks responsible." Recent in-the-field findings from Sophos X-Ops' Active Adversary report highlighted the continued threat of ransomware to small-and-medium sized businesses. Data from more than 150 incident response (IR) cases in 2023 found that ransomware was, for the fourth year running, the most frequently encountered attack type, occurring in 70% of IR cases Sophos X-Ops investigated. "While improving cooperation and working with law enforcement after an attack are all good developments, we need to move from simply treating the symptoms of ransomware to preventing those attacks in the first place.