A small construction company that refused to pay for security help was hit by ransomware and went out of business months later, according to cybersecurity consultant Dave Hatter of Intrust IT. The owner had vetoed a proposal from Hatter's firm, saying his one-person IT setup was all he could afford and that his business was too small to interest hackers. Three weeks later, the same company was hit with ransomware that encrypted an old unpatched Windows server holding all its important data. The only backup was an external drive connected to the same server, so it was encrypted too. The company could not pay employees or determine who owed money, and it closed within months. Hatter noted the importance of off-site or cloud backups and patching, and that ransomware gangs target small businesses as readily as large ones. The article also recounts a second incident where attackers used a man-in-the-middle attack to steal a Microsoft 365 login and 2FA code, but the victim's security software detected the anomalous login and revoked the session. That story shows the value of defense-in-depth, but the two cases are separate and not directly compared in```json {