Average downtime after an attack stretches to 21 days. But the direct costs—ransom payments, recovery expenses and lost revenue—are only part of the picture. The often-overlooked risk is what happens while your defenses are down.
AI is accelerating the threat on both sides, automating reconnaissance and compressing the timeline from breach to damage. Ransomware’s immediate damage is severe. But the secondary effects—what it disables, and what that enables—can be costly, too.
The attack after the attack
When ransomware hits, the immediate crisis consumes attention. IT teams work to isolate affected systems. Leadership weighs ransom decisions. Communications scrambles to manage stakeholders. Treasury, meanwhile, faces a problem that can’t wait: Payments still need to move.
Vendors expect settlement. Payroll deadlines don’t shift. Urgent transactions queue up for approval. And the controls that would normally screen those payments? They’re locked out with everything else.
This is the window where secondary fraud flourishes.
Bad actors know that a ransomware event means reduced oversight. Payment requests that would normally trigger review may sail through because the review mechanisms are offline. Fraudulent account changes go unverified because verification tools are inaccessible. The chaos becomes cover.
The scenario: A regional healthcare network
A ransomware attack encrypts the internal systems of a regional healthcare network with $2 billion in annual revenue. Claims processing stops. The ERP is offline. Vendor records are inaccessible.
Within hours, treasury starts receiving urgent payment requests. Some are legitimate—a medical supplier threatening to halt shipments, a staffing agency demanding immediate settlement. Others are harder to verify. An email from a known vendor includes updated banking details. A request from the CFO’s address flags a time-sensitive wire for a “confidential settlement.”
Under normal circumstances, these would trigger verification workflows. The team would check account details against the vendor master. They’d validate that the receiving account matches the expected counterparty. They’d flag the velocity and timing anomalies.
But the tools that enable those checks live on the same network that’s currently encrypted. Treasury is flying blind.
By the time systems are restored 18 days later, three fraudulent payments totaling $1.4 million have cleared. The vendor with “updated banking details” was a spoofed request. The “confidential settlement” went to an account controlled by the attackers. The funds are unrecoverable.
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