Ransomware Attacks in Texas: What Businesses Face in 2026 and How to Respond

Ransomware is not a distant, big-city problem for Texas businesses. It is a local one. Texas ranks second in the nation for cybercrime complaints, and attackers have hit Texas cities, school districts, hospitals, utilities, and thousands of small businesses, often all at once through a shared vendor. This guide lays out what the data actually shows about ransomware in Texas, the incidents worth learning from, what an attack really costs, and the specific steps that keep a business off the victim list.

What’s in This Guide

The Texas Ransomware Picture Right Now

Texas carries a disproportionate share of the country’s cybercrime, and ransomware sits at the center of it. In its 2024 Internet Crime Report, the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center ranked Texas second in the nation for complaint volume, behind only California. Victims across the state reported roughly 1.35 billion dollars in losses that year, part of a record 16.6 billion dollars in losses reported nationwide.

Ransomware is not fading as newer threats emerge. The FBI reported that ransomware complaints rose 9 percent year over year and remained the single most pervasive threat to organizations in critical infrastructure sectors, the same sectors that anchor Texas employment: healthcare, energy, manufacturing, education, and government. The agency logged more than 4,800 complaints from critical infrastructure organizations, with ransomware and data breaches the most reported.

One honest caveat: the FBI does not publish a Texas-only ransomware dollar figure. The 1.35 billion dollars above covers all reported cybercrime in the state, and the ransomware-specific numbers here are national. What the combined data makes clear is the direction of travel. Texas absorbs an outsized volume of attacks, and ransomware remains the most damaging category for the organizations that get hit. For a deeper breakdown of the national numbers, see our roundup of the latest ransomware attack data.

Source: FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center, 2024 Internet Crime Report

Notable Ransomware Incidents in Texas

The most instructive Texas ransomware event is still the coordinated attack of August 16, 2019. In the early morning hours, 22 Texas entities reported ransomware infections at nearly the same time, most of them smaller local governments in towns like Borger and Keene. State investigators concluded a single threat actor was behind all of them. The Texas Department of Information Resources activated the State Operations Center, and by roughly a week later every affected entity had moved from response into recovery with business-critical services restored.

The lesson for private businesses is the mechanism, not the target. Attacking 22 organizations on one morning is only efficient if you can reach them through a common door. Investigators pointed to shared IT infrastructure and managed service provider access as the likely path. That same pattern, one compromised vendor cascading to many downstream clients, is exactly what threatens small businesses that outsource IT without confirming their provider’s own security posture.

These incidents rarely make national headlines the way a Fortune 500 breach does, which creates a dangerous false comfort for local business owners. If you want a wider view of what has been hitting organizations across the state, we track other recent Texas hacks and the defenses that would have blunted them.

Source: Texas Department of Information Resources, coordinated ransomware attack advisory

Why Texas Businesses Are in the Crosshairs

There is a persistent myth that ransomware crews only chase large enterprises with deep pockets. The data says the opposite. Verizon’s 2025 Data Breach Investigations Report found that 88 percent of breaches at small and midsize businesses involved ransomware, compared with 39 percent at large organizations. Attackers are not skipping small companies; they are prioritizing them.

The reasons are structural. A midsize accounting firm in Sugar Land or a manufacturer in San Antonio typically runs lean, without a dedicated security team watching alerts overnight. Backups may exist but go untested. Multi-factor authentication may be enabled for some accounts and not others. Each gap is a foothold, and automated attacks scan for them at scale. Texas’s economic mix compounds the exposure: the state is dense with the exact sectors attackers favor, including healthcare, energy, construction, logistics, and professional services that hold sensitive client data.

Understanding your own risk posture is the job of a strategic IT leader, which is why many Texas businesses that cannot justify a full-time CISO bring in one on a fractional basis.

Get a strategic security roadmap with Virtual CIO services

Source: Verizon 2025 Data Breach Investigations Report

What a Texas Ransomware Attack Actually Costs

Owners tend to fixate on the ransom demand, but that is usually the smallest line on the invoice. Sophos’s State of Ransomware 2025 report, based on responses from 3,400 IT and security leaders at organizations with 100 to 5,000 employees, put the average recovery cost, excluding any ransom paid, at 1.53 million dollars. That figure actually fell from 2.73 million the year before, but it still represents a business-ending number for many small companies.

The real damage is time. IBM’s 2025 Cost of a Data Breach report found breaches took an average of 241 days to identify and contain. For a Texas business, that translates into weeks of halted operations, staff overtime, emergency consultants, legal and notification costs, lost contracts, and customers who quietly move on. Paying the ransom does not shortcut this, and Sophos found roughly half of hit organizations paid anyway, often without getting all their data back cleanly. Recovery speed is dictated almost entirely by preparation, especially whether backups were tested and isolated before the attack.

How long recovery drags on, and how much it ultimately costs, comes down to the plan you had in place beforehand. Our data on how long ransomware recovery actually takes shows just how wide the gap is between prepared and unprepared organizations.

See how tested backups cut ransomware downtime

Source: Sophos State of Ransomware 2025 | IBM Cost of a Data Breach 2025

What Texas Businesses Should Do Right Now

The defenses that stop or contain ransomware are well understood and, for a small business, achievable. The gap is almost never awareness; it is execution and consistency. Here is the priority order that gives a Texas business the most protection per dollar.

1. Keep tested, isolated backups. Follow a 3-2-1 approach: three copies of your data, on two types of media, with one copy offline or immutable so ransomware cannot encrypt it. Then test a restore on a schedule. An untested backup is a hope, not a plan.
2. Enforce multi-factor authentication everywhere. Email, VPN, remote desktop, and admin accounts are the front doors attackers pick. MFA blocks the large majority of credential-based intrusions and is the single highest-value control most businesses are still missing on some accounts.
3. Deploy endpoint detection and response with 24/7 monitoring. Signature-based antivirus misses modern ransomware. EDR watches behavior and can isolate an infected machine, but only if someone is watching the alerts at 2 a.m. That is why many businesses buy it as a managed service.
4. Patch quickly and shrink the attack surface. Keep operating systems, firewalls, and internet-facing services current, and close remote access ports that do not need to be open. Most ransomware exploits a known, already-patched vulnerability.
5. Train your people on phishing. A large share of ransomware still starts with one clicked email. Short, regular training plus simulated phishing measurably lowers click rates.
6. Write and rehearse an incident response plan. Decide in advance who to call, how to isolate systems, where backups live, and what your legal and notification duties are. The businesses that recover fastest rehearsed the bad day before it arrived.

If building and maintaining all six layers in-house is not realistic, the practical path is a managed cybersecurity partner that runs them for you and monitors around the clock.

Protect your business with managed cybersecurity

Source: CISA StopRansomware guidance

How CNiC Helps Texas Businesses Stay Ahead of Ransomware

CNiC Solutions is a Texas-based managed IT and cybersecurity provider with offices in the Houston area and San Antonio, working with small and midsize businesses across the state. The reason we lead with the 2019 coordinated attack is that we see the same vendor-access risk it exposed play out constantly: businesses inherit their IT provider’s security posture, for better or worse. Our model is built to be the better half of that equation.

That means tested backup and disaster recovery, managed endpoint detection and response with round-the-clock monitoring, multi-factor authentication and patch management enforced as standard, phishing awareness training, and an incident response plan rehearsed before it is needed, not drafted during a crisis. For businesses that want senior security strategy without a full-time hire, our Virtual CIO service sets the roadmap and keeps it current as threats change.

Explore fully managed IT and security for Texas businesses

Frequently Asked Questions

Methodology and Sources

David McFarlene Founder & CEO

David McFarlene is the owner and founder of CNiC Solutions, a trusted IT services and cybersecurity company serving the Houston, TX area. With over 20 years of experience in managed IT, infrastructure design, cloud solutions, and data security, David helps businesses and homeowners stay protected and productive through dependable, personalized technology support. He leads the CNiC Solutions team with a focus on reliability, transparency, and long-term relationships, ensuring clients always have a knowledgeable expert they can trust.

See Full Bio

IT Services Network Cabling Cloud Solutions Cybersecurity Data Backup & Recovery Managed IT Services Infrastructure Management Telecommunications Virtual CIO (vCIO) WebRTC