By the time files are encrypted, the interesting part is over. Everything that happened in the days before it is a sequence of network events, and that sequence is where detection is still useful.
MITRE ATT&CK techniques covered: T1486 Data Encrypted for Impact · T1490 Inhibit System Recovery · T1021 Remote Services · T1083 File and Directory Discovery
Ransomware detection means identifying a ransomware operation while it is happening. The important word is WHEN: an operation runs for days or weeks before anything is encrypted, and almost all of that time is spent doing things that look nothing like ransomware.
Three adjacent terms get used as if they were the same thing, and the difference decides what you are actually buying:
Encryption is the last step, and it is the only step most organisations ever see. Before it, a fairly predictable sequence has to happen, and almost every stage of it crosses the network:
Endpoint tooling is genuinely good at the encryption stage, and it should stay. The gap is earlier and elsewhere. Hypervisors, storage appliances, network-attached storage, backup targets and industrial equipment frequently run no agent at all, and those are exactly the systems a competent operator goes after. Agents can also be tampered with by an attacker who already has administrative rights.
Network detection does not have that problem, because the sensor is not on the machine being attacked. It watches from beside the traffic, so an attacker cannot turn it off from inside the host they control.
We are a detection company, not a prevention company, and we would rather say that plainly than let you assume otherwise. What we do is make the sequence visible and evidenced, early enough that intervention is still meaningful, and correlated into one story rather than six unrelated alerts.
Where you already run a firewall we can integrate to act on a confirmed indicator, but the honest framing is this: we shorten the time between the first network event and somebody knowing about it. We do not promise that no ransomware will ever execute in your environment, and any vendor who does is selling you something they cannot deliver.
Identifying a ransomware operation while it is running rather than after it finishes. Its whole value is how early it fires: an operation spends days or weeks gaining access, mapping shares and removing backups before any file is encrypted, and every one of those steps is visible on the network.
By the staging rather than the payload. Credential use spreading to machines an account never touched, systematic enumeration of file shares, backup systems being reached by the wrong host, administrative tooling appearing between workstations, and a large upload to somewhere the organisation has never sent data before.
That is the only version worth having, and it is what the staging signals are for. What nobody should promise is certainty: these are indicators of an intrusion heading somewhere bad, and acting on them early is the point. A detection that waits for encryption has given up the time that mattered.
Prevention tries to stop it running - patching, hardening, application control, blocking the delivery email. Detection assumes something eventually gets through and tries to notice it in time. They are complements, and the common failure is buying only the first and discovering the gap on the day it matters.
It covers the endpoints it is installed on, and it is a necessary part of the answer. It does not cover a device that cannot run an agent, a machine where the agent was disabled early in the intrusion, or the lateral movement between two hosts that each look locally normal.
Stealing the data before encrypting it, so that paying to decrypt does not stop the data being published. It changes what you are defending: encryption is no longer the whole of the harm, and the exfiltration that precedes it is both the greater risk and the earlier signal.
Usually credential misuse and reconnaissance. An account authenticating to systems it has no business touching, broad share enumeration, and someone taking an unusual interest in where the backups live. None of it looks like ransomware, which is exactly why it arrives early enough to be useful.
Because backups decide whether you have to pay. Removing or encrypting them turns a recoverable incident into a negotiation, so a backup server being reached by an unexpected host is one of the most valuable single signals available.
The staging signals are visible as they happen, so the honest answer depends on how quickly somebody acts on them. The detection is not the slow part.
No, and nothing does. Detection shortens the incident; backups decide how bad the worst outcome is. An organisation needs both, and the tested restore is the half most often assumed rather than verified.
Tell us whether you suspect something is already inside, or whether you want to measure what your current tools would catch. Either way you get a concrete next step.
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