The Hidden Risk Inside Your Server:

Why ‘Do-It-All’ Environments Invite Ransomware

Ransomware is a type of malware that interferes with a system or server. It does this by limiting or completely cutting off access to your data until a ransom is paid. Ransomware seems like an ominous threat, but companies never expect themselves to be targeted — until they are.

• Why do attacks happen?
• What makes you vulnerable?
• How can you protect yourself?
• What happens if you are attacked?

These are all important questions to be asking yourself.

Most ransomware attacks don’t start with sophisticated exploits — they succeed because of poor infrastructure design. Ransomware is really good at taking advantage of flaws in mainstream software. Every technology that is wonderful can be used in a harmful way. There is no one single cause of an attack, which means there is no one single solution for preventing a cyberattack. However, there are things to be mindful of and steps you can take to protect yourself and your organization.

Why Is Ransomware So Dangerous?

The target of a ransomware attack is always data because data is valuable. It’s a form of currency, so any location holding data is at risk of being a target. This is why industries such as the financial sector, healthcare/ medical organizations, transportation companies, and law firms are at the highest risk. These institutions have data attackers want — credit card information, social security numbers, phone numbers, addresses. This information is worth a lot of money to people with bad intentions.

Ransomware attacks can cause:

• Extended downtime
• Data loss
• Revenue loss
• Noncompliance
• Having to pay large ransoms with no guarantee you’ll actually get your data back
• Reputation damage
• Risk of lawsuits
• Potential fines and law enforcement involvement

Let’s look at the data:

One study found that 25% of organizations are forced to close after a ransomware attack and 80% of companies who paid the ransom suffered a second attack. Another study found that after a ransomware attack, 57% of businesses shut down operations temporarily, 40% lost significant revenue, and only 13% fully recovered their data. Companies experiencing data loss lasting more than 10 days also face a 93% bankruptcy rate within one year. The risk for small businesses is even greater, with 60% of small businesses shutting down within 6 months of a cyberattack.

These are scary statistics, but it’s important for organizations to understand how dangerous ransomware can be. At Protected Harbor, we are constantly looking for new causes of ransomware and ways we can protect our clients and ourselves from an attack. In this blog, we are specifically going to focus on how mixed-use servers can make organizations more vulnerable.

What Are Mixed-Use Servers?

As we mentioned, there is no single cause of a ransomware attack, which means organizations need a multi-layered approach to protect themselves. Many organizations often don’t understand the factors that put them at risk, so making yourself aware of the things that increase your vulnerability and addressing those issues is one of the best ways to protect your business.

During a recent new client assessment, we encountered mixed-use servers, which are servers that have multiple different roles/ workloads. For example, one server that hosts websites as well as databases, or a server that hosts file storage and VPN storage. Using a single server to provide one or multiple key services may seem more convenient for your business, but this is like hitting the jackpot for attackers.

No one intentionally designs bad infrastructure, so how does this happen?

The most common reason mixed-use servers occur is because of cost pressure. Organizations fear the high cost of licensing and adding new servers, so they may try to save money by enabling as many network rolls as possible. Another cause is developer-led builds that prioritize getting you set up fast, without prioritizing the long-term. We have seen many SaaS vendors enable programmers to directly install the programs they’re creating. This is an issue because programmers are excellent at solving code problems, but they usually have little to no training on infrastructure. This means they are not building your environment for scale, which will create friction down the line as your organization tries to grow.

This not only increases your vulnerability to an attack, but also impacts performance. Problems develop as multiple applications stored on a single server become more active.  For example, if a server is both a web server and database server, this can create performance problems when the database server is running complex queries. These queries begin using more and more of the server’s resources, which reduces the server’s ability to respond to web requests.

When performance is threatened, everything is on the line.

How Mixed-Use Servers Make You Vulnerable to An Attack

Mixed-use servers hurt performance because multiple key services are competing for resources, which means none of them can perform optimally. When hit with a cyberattack, mixed-use servers also make you more vulnerable in the following ways:

• Increased blast radius: It’s easier for attackers to find and steal important data if it’s all stored in one place. Separating workloads makes it more difficult for attackers to find the valuable data they’re looking for because it’s spread out.
• Damage happens faster: Mixed-use servers allow ransomware to spread within minutes — not hours. This means a cyberattack can do more damage to your organization in a shorter amount of time. By the time you realize something is wrong, it may already be too late.
• Multiple workloads impacted: If you have multiple workloads on one server, multiple services will go down if that server is targeted by ransomware. Separating workloads helps to prevent multiple key services from being impacted during an attack, which reduces the chances of an attack crippling your business.

Can Maintenance Save You?

An added problem with mixed-use servers is that they are typically poorly maintained and often enabled with open security, both of which create fertile ground for ransomware attacks. Installing updates and security patches are crucial, but they require downtime. For some organizations, it can be hard to prioritize these updates and patches when even an hour of downtime can mean missed transactions, lost revenue, and idle staff. For businesses that use mixed-use servers, these maintenance windows are significantly longer, making the decision to prioritize maintenance and security even more difficult.

Maintenance downtime expands on mixed-use servers because each use will have its own updates that need to be installed. For example, if you have a server that acts as both a web server and a database server, installing all of the updates for the database, web server, and core operating system can result in hours of downtime. A maintenance window that large may cause a business to prioritize uptime and skip maintenance and security patches entirely. However, a system that is not properly maintained or adequately protected is extremely vulnerable to ransomware.

A cyberattack will cost you much more than a few hours of downtime.

The Protected Harbor Difference

Protected Harbor designs and operates infrastructure differently:

we don’t just address symptoms — we fix core issues.

We design environments around the application itself — separating workloads, isolating risk, and ensuring that no single failure can take down your entire business. Our engineers take the time to learn each client’s application inside and out so we can design infrastructure tailored the unique needs and workloads of their organization. This is what we call Application-Aware Infrastructure: where performance, security, and accountability are engineered together, not bolted on later.

Our team understands how dangerous ransomware can be because we’ve seen the havoc it wreaks firsthand. This is why we prioritize security as one of the most important features when designing your environment, instead of treating it like an afterthought. This allows us to deploy an improved and resilient security platform that will help to keep your organization safe from ransomware attacks.

If you’re not sure whether your business relies on mixed-use servers, we’ll show you.

Contact our team for a complimentary Infrastructure Risk Assessment where we will evaluate your environment and identify:

• Mixed-use server exposure
• Ransomware blast radius risk
• Performance bottlenecks tied to infrastructure design

No obligation — just clarity on where you stand.

Your ‘Efficient’ Server Setup Might Be a Security Nightmare

Many organizations using mixed-use servers end up here because infrastructure decisions are made around cost or convenience — not how the application actually behaves in production. While cost and convenience are important things to think about, you can’t risk your entire business being crippled by a cyberattack.

Consider:

• Do you have servers running multiple roles?
• Do maintenance windows keep getting delayed?
• Are you noticing performance issues during peak usage?
• Are your backups completely isolated?
• Can developers or vendors deploy directly to production servers?

If you want help protecting your organization from ransomware, contact Protected Harbor today.