A Practical Guide to Ransomware recovery (without paying) and Data Loss Prevention

Ransomware is the single biggest financial threat in cybersecurity today. While many people associate it with locked files and a ransom note, that is only part of the problem. Increasingly, attackers are also stealing data before encrypting it. They then use that stolen data as leverage, threatening to release it publicly unless they are paid. This tactic means that even if you have resilient backup infrastructure in place, your business can still be extorted.

Two Parts, One Strategy

To truly defend against ransomware, you need a two-part strategy. First, you must be able to recover from an attack by restoring your systems and data. Second, you must prevent attackers from stealing the data. These two efforts—building a reliable backup system and deploying a data loss prevention (DLP) solution—should happen at the same time. They reinforce each other and offer much stronger protection when implemented together.

Know What You’re Protecting

Start by understanding what data and systems are critical to your business, and your existing corporate disaster recovery plan. This is not just a technical inventory. It requires participation from teams across the company, including legal, finance, human resources, operations, and IT. You need a clear picture of what your business needs to function, what needs to be preserved for legal or regulatory reasons, and what data would be devastating to lose or expose.

Certain kinds of data are not just sensitive—they are protected by law. Patient health records, including records on employee health and healthcare decisions commonly kept by HR, are covered by HIPAA. Financial records are subject to a myriad array of state and federal financial privacy laws. Personally identifiable information, including names, addresses, Social Security numbers, and account details, often falls under state-level privacy statutes. If this kind of data is leaked or stolen, your organization could face not just reputational damage but legal penalties and mandatory breach notifications. These legal risks make protecting sensitive data a matter of compliance, not just best practice.

Know What You Don't Need to Protect 

During this process, you should identify systems and data that do not need to be backed up. Many applications can be reinstalled from source media. Some virtual machines can be rebuilt quickly from templates. Not everything is worth preserving, and excluding non-essential systems helps control costs, reduce complexity, and reduce recovery time.

Measure and Size Your Solution

Once you know what must be backed up, estimate the total amount of data involved. This measurement is critical to selecting and budgeting for storage, both on-site and off-site. Many immutable storage options carry a higher price per gigabyte than traditional storage, so accuracy here will help you right-size your infrastructure and avoid overpaying or under-protecting.

Next, choose a backup solution that fits your environment and supports immutable backups. Immutability means that once backups are written, they cannot be changed or deleted—not even by an attacker with full administrative access. This protects your backups from tampering and ensures that a copy of your critical data remains intact even if your systems are compromised.

Your backup system should also support all the platforms you use, whether that includes cloud services, on-premise infrastructure, virtual machines, or physical servers. You want a unified system that covers everything you depend on.

Your storage should be structured with both local recovery and off-site disaster recovery in mind. Onsite storage enables fast restores if a local failure occurs. Offsite storage provides a safeguard if your primary environment is damaged or inaccessible. The most important factor in both cases is that the storage supports true immutability. You should verify this through testing. If you can delete or overwrite files without special conditions, then the storage is not truly immutable.

Test and Monitor Regularly

Backups also need to be maintained. Someone should be checking them weekly to confirm that backups are running without error. Every quarter, run a full restore to validate that recovery is possible across all major system types. It is better to discover a configuration issue during a routine test than during a real crisis. Recovery procedures should be written down, tested, and practiced.

Additionally, the scope of your backups should be reviewed as part of every IT project.  It is important to determine if the project adds new sources of data which must be protected.

Backups Are Not Enough

Even with flawless backups, there is still the risk of data being stolen before encryption takes place. This is why you must also implement a data loss prevention solution. Data Loss Prevention tools monitor where sensitive data lives, how it moves, and who has access to it. They can alert your team when someone tries to upload confidential files to personal cloud storage, send them through unapproved email channels, or copy them to removable devices. Data Loss Prevention can prevent both intentional exfiltration and accidental exposure.

Use the Same Priority List to Scope DLP

Since you have already identified your critical systems and data during the backup planning process, much of the groundwork for Data Loss Prevention (DLP) is already complete. That same list of high-priority endpoints and data assets becomes the foundation for your DLP deployment.

Implementation begins by mapping those known data sources across your environment. This involves identifying where sensitive information resides, how it is accessed, and how it moves between systems and users. Using that context, you define protection policies based on business need and risk. For example, some files may be restricted to internal use only, while others may require encryption before being transmitted.

DLP tools are deployed at key control points, such as endpoint devices, email systems, cloud platforms, and network gateways. These tools monitor data activity and apply the rules you have defined. Depending on the policy, the system may allow the action, log it for later review, alert your security team, or block it entirely.

Typical behaviors to monitor include uploading confidential files to unapproved cloud services, emailing spreadsheets with personal information to external contacts, copying documents to USB drives, or printing regulated data from unauthorized machines.

An effective DLP implementation often integrates with identity systems and behavior analytics to provide context. If a user is accessing files outside normal working hours or viewing data they do not typically use, the system can flag that behavior for review. This additional layer of insight helps reduce false positives and makes your response more precise.

By starting with the data and systems you have already prioritized, DLP becomes easier to implement and manage.  It is also more effective. You get meaningful protection without creating unnecessary noise or administrative burden.

Final Thoughts

The combination of backups and DLP creates a much more resilient defense. Backups alone can help you recover from a ransomware attack, but they do nothing to stop attackers from leaking your data. DLP tools help close that gap by detecting and blocking unauthorized data transfers. When you deploy both systems together, you are better protected from both disruption and extortion.

If you are looking to protect your organization from ransomware and modern data theft, Stoic Cybersecurity are experts at designing backup and DLP solutions to protect your business.  You can reach out to us via our Contact Form.