When people think about ransomware targets, they think about hospitals, pipelines, and government agencies. They think about incidents in the news, attacks with names, organizations large enough to make the front page when something goes wrong.

That mental model is wrong — and it's costing Canadian small businesses millions of dollars per year.

According to the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security's National Cyber Threat Assessment, Canada ranked second globally for ransomware victims in 2025, trailing only the United States. That's not second in terms of attack sophistication, or second in terms of a few large incidents that skew the numbers. It's second in raw volume — the sheer number of Canadian organizations that had their files encrypted and received a ransom demand.

Why Canada? The Actual Reasons.

There are four structural reasons Canada is a preferred ransomware target, none of which have anything to do with any particular industry being targeted:

1. SMB concentration. Canada has 1.19 million employer businesses. 97.9% of them are small businesses (fewer than 100 employees). Small businesses have valuable data — client records, financial information, operational systems — but they almost never have the IT infrastructure that large enterprises have. No security operations centre. No dedicated incident response team. No 24/7 monitoring. To an attacker, small businesses are high-value, low-resistance targets at scale.

2. High connectivity, low security posture. Canadian small businesses have almost universally adopted cloud services, email, and internet-connected infrastructure. But adoption of security controls — endpoint detection, MFA, network monitoring — has lagged behind significantly. The attack surface has grown; the defences haven't kept pace.

3. Willingness and ability to pay. Canadian businesses are generally creditworthy, have access to cyber insurance (which often covers ransom payments), and operate in a jurisdiction with functioning banking systems that make ransom payment straightforward. For organized ransomware groups running what amount to extortion businesses, Canada is a reliable payer.

4. Jurisdictional complexity. Canadian law enforcement has limited ability to pursue ransomware operators based in Russia, Eastern Europe, or other non-extradition jurisdictions. Attacks on Canadian businesses carry a low risk of prosecution for the attackers.

Who Is Actually Attacking Canadian Businesses?

Modern ransomware is not the work of lone hackers. It's deployed by organized criminal enterprises running Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) platforms — a franchise model for extortion.

The platform operators develop and maintain the ransomware, manage the infrastructure for receiving ransom payments (typically in cryptocurrency), and provide technical support to paying "affiliates." Affiliates pay a subscription fee, gain access to the ransomware toolkit and a management dashboard, and keep 70–80% of any ransom they collect. The operators take the rest.

The most prolific groups targeting Canadian businesses in 2025 include LockBit (currently operating under successor names after a partial takedown in 2024), ALPHV/BlackCat affiliates, and Play ransomware. These are not amateur operations — they have customer service lines, negotiation teams, and in some cases, formal HR functions for their technical staff.

The Affiliate Model in Practice

Because ransomware is franchise-based, the person who encrypts your files is almost certainly not the person who built the ransomware. The affiliate is often a freelance criminal who specializes in initial access — finding a way into your network — and sells that access either directly or uses it themselves to deploy the ransomware toolkit. This means there is rarely a direct connection between a specific ransomware brand and a specific attack on a specific business.

The Small Business Attack Profile

Most ransomware attacks on Canadian small businesses follow a predictable pattern:

  1. Initial access. The most common entry points are phishing emails (an employee clicks a malicious link or attachment), exposed Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) ports (a scanner finds your open RDP, brute-forces the password), and compromised credentials purchased from other breaches.
  2. Dwell time. Attackers often remain inside a compromised network for weeks or months before triggering the ransomware. During this time, they map the network, identify backups, assess what data is valuable, and in some cases, exfiltrate sensitive data to use as additional leverage ("pay the ransom or we publish your client files").
  3. Encryption. The ransomware is triggered — often on a weekend or holiday when staff are unlikely to notice immediately — and encrypts every file the ransomware can reach. On a typical small business network, this takes minutes.
  4. Extortion. A ransom note appears on encrypted screens with instructions for payment. For Canadian small businesses, demands typically range from $15,000 to $150,000, calibrated based on the size and apparent financial capacity of the target.

What "$1.27 Million in Total Impact" Actually Means

When reports cite the average total impact of a ransomware attack at $1.27 million for a Canadian SMB, the number sounds implausibly large for a company with 10 employees. Here's where it comes from:

The Industries Most Frequently Targeted in Canada

The CCCS tracks ransomware incidents by sector. In Canada, the sectors most frequently targeted by ransomware are: professional services (legal, accounting, consulting), manufacturing and construction, healthcare and social services, retail, and property management.

Note what is not on that list: banking and financial services. Large financial institutions are heavily regulated, heavily monitored, and expensive to attack successfully. Ransomware groups don't primarily target them — they target the smaller, less defended businesses that service them and service their clients.

The Trades Business Exposure

Trades businesses — electrical, plumbing, HVAC, construction — are an increasingly targeted sector. They have valuable data (client contracts, supplier information, financial records, employee payroll), they often run business-critical software (dispatch systems, estimating tools, accounting) on single Windows servers with minimal security, and they typically have no IT staff. They are precisely the profile ransomware affiliates look for.

What Actually Reduces Your Risk

The statistics are not destiny. Ransomware groups aren't targeting specific companies — they're running automated scans looking for exposed systems and known vulnerabilities. Organizations that close the most common entry points drop off the target list not because attackers give up on them specifically, but because there are easier targets available.

The three highest-impact controls for a Canadian small business:

Canada being the #2 global ransomware target is not a problem that individual small businesses can solve at a national level. But it does tell you something important: the risk is not theoretical. It is active, it is targeting organizations exactly like yours, and the defences required are available, affordable, and not technically complicated to implement.