Already Behind? Catch Up on Cybersecurity Now
Welcome to 2026. The holidays are over, the new budgets are approved, and somewhere right now, a ransomware group is encrypting its first victim of the year. The threat numbers didn’t reset on January 1st. If anything, they got worse:
Global ransomware payments topped $1.1 billion in 2025 (Chainalysis)
The median time to identify a breach is still 204 days (IBM)
Over 2,200 confirmed data breaches were publicly disclosed in 2025 in the U.S. alone
Most organizations entered the new year exactly the way they left the old one, under-protected and over-confident. The good news? January is still the single best month to make meaningful change. People are back at their desks, money is freshly allocated, and inertia hasn’t fully set in yet.
Here are the moves that actually matter right now.
Force Multi-Factor Authentication Everywhere (No More Exceptions). If any user, employee, vendor, or contractor can still reach email, VPN, Microsoft 365, or your line-of-business apps with just a password, fix that this month. Conditional access policies take an afternoon to configure and instantly kill the majority of account-takeover attempts.
Turn On Immutable Backups. Ransomware actors deleted or encrypted 74% of backups in 2025 attacks. If your current backup solution allows an attacker (or a compromised admin account) to delete backups, it isn’t a backup—it’s a single point of failure. Immutable, versioned, air-gapped copies are table stakes now.
Run a Real Password Audit. Use the built-in tools in Microsoft Entra, Okta, or your endpoint detection platform to find reused, weak, and breached passwords. Then, enforce phishing-resistant MFA (FIDO2 keys or passkeys) for every privileged account.
Patch the Things That Actually Get Exploited. Stop trying to patch everything. Start with ProxyShell/ProxyLogon successors, Log4j-class flaws, and the top 15 CVEs routinely used in ransomware attacks. A focused, risk-based patching program beats a perfect but impossible one.
Test Your Incident Response Plan (or Write One)Most plans gather dust until the day they’re needed—and that’s the day you discover the emergency contact list is two years out of date. Schedule a tabletop exercise before the end of Q1. It’s cheaper than living through the real thing.
Admit What You Can’t Do In-House. Very few small and mid-sized organizations can afford to attract, retain, and support a whole security team. That’s not a criticism; it’s math. A competent managed service provider (MSP) gives you access to an entire security operations center for less than the salary of one senior analyst.
You don’t have to sign a massive contract tomorrow, but you should at least get a second opinion on your current posture.
A Simple January Checklist
□ Enforce MFA on every external-facing service
□ Verify backups are immutable and offline
□ Remove local admin rights from everyday users
□ Enable endpoint detection and response (EDR) on all devices
□ Schedule one lunch-and-learn phishing session before February
□ Get an independent gap assessment (internal or third-party)
2026 is going to be another brutal year for cybersecurity, but it doesn’t have to be brutal for your organization. The difference between the companies that spend January recovering from a holiday-season breach and those that pay to strengthen their defenses usually comes down to a handful of decisions made before the chaos begins. Start now.
Future-you will thank you.