At Al Yathiq Secure Finance, an esteemed mid-tier investment and wealth management firm serving affluent clients across the GCC and Europe, the workday began in serene precision. It was a busy Sunday morning after the summer vacation. Senior Vice President, Mr. Omar Al-Fahad, scanned global markets in his boardroom, while the compliance and operations team prepared briefing notes for the Central Bank’s quarterly review.

Suddenly, at 09:24 AM, calm dissolved into alarm. Desktop and laptop screens flickered. Employee endpoint devices went black with a warning in bold crimson letters:

“Your systems are encrypted. All client ledgers, financial models, and personal data are locked. Pay 100 Bitcoin within 48 hours, or the sensitive and confidential data of your clients will be shared in a public forum.” - LockBit.

Mr. Omar was shocked and terrified at the same time. He has devoted his entire career to expanding the bank’s portfolio and has earned client trust over the past 35 years. He could not have Al Yathiq’s reputation tarnished by a ransomware attack, but unfortunately, his options were restricted by the ransomware group LockBit.

 

The Attack Unfolds: A Symphony of Failures

A week earlier, a senior operations analyst based in Al Yathiq’s Dubai branch received a convincing WhatsApp voice note purportedly from a +66 number, featuring a family profile picture of the head of customer operations, who was on vacation in Thailand at the time. It was a request to review documentation for a client on which he has been working with the head recently, with a seemingly authentic link to a Word file. Without thinking twice, the analyst clicked the link and entered his credentials on a portal that was a replica of the company’s original. To LockBit’s delight, the crafty vishing attack led them to the first entry point via the company’s SharePoint server.

Simultaneously, the attackers piggybacked on third-party-managed security provider-supplied remote access tools—whose software lacked up-to-date patches and weak authentication measures. Attackers leveraged compromised credentials from this vendor to escalate privileges inside Al Yathiq’s core wealth management systems.

Within hours, the attackers swiftly moved laterally, exploiting a misconfigured cloud storage bucket containing unencrypted client financial information. This misconfiguration enabled unauthorized API calls, facilitated the exfiltration of unencrypted files, and enabled the deployment of ransomware loaders on critical servers.

 

Consequences: A Calm Turned into Crisis

By midday, news of the ransomware attack spread and was picked up by local media. In the Emergency Response Room, Mr. Omar and leadership faced multiple challenges dealing with government cyber bodies, regulators, clients, media, and staff. Many actions were taken on the fly because the business continuity and crisis response plans were not updated or tested for this situation. The IT department tried to build the core system but was surprised to find that the backups were incomplete and outdated.  

Even if they paid the ransom, there was no assurance that confidential information would not be leaked to the dark web, leading to lawsuits from national and international clients.

Mr. Omar felt helpless. Six months ago, he had accepted all the cybersecurity risks identified by an advisory firm that conducted a comprehensive cybersecurity assessment. The budget to address the security debt and implement the suggested cyber controls was diverted to open new branches in Germany and Luxembourg, the fate of which remains undecided. The cyber insurance provider declined to pay the sum assured because Al Yathiq failed to adhere to the basic cybersecurity hygiene mandated by the policy.  

 

Lessons in Resilience: What Al Yathiq learned the hard way

The attack exploited sweeping cybersecurity vulnerabilities to execute the ransomware attack—lack of social engineering and vishing knowledge among employees, compromised remote access tools, unpatched servers, cloud misconfigurations, weak third-party security hygiene, unencrypted confidential data, and exposed privileged credentials. To recover and protect the future from cyber risk, Al Yathiq took urgent actions, including but not limited to:

  • Conducted company-wide security awareness training and simulation exercise to resist social engineering threats like phishing, vishing, and to enhance human-centric security posture
  • With the realization that organizations must treat their vendors and managed service providers as extensions of their own attack surface, a third-party risk management program was established
  • Implemented multi-factor authentication (MFA) and strict privileged access management (PAM)
  • Mandated a rigorous vulnerability and patch management program
  • Implemented technical controls via tools to detect and respond to zero-day vulnerabilities and cloud misconfigurations
  • Established and operationalized a cyber resilience framework

This fictional drama, inspired by real ransomware trends in the Middle East, illuminates how multiple failure points, when combined, amplify risk. Al Yathiq survived—but barely. Their story is a stark reminder that ransomware is no longer a possibility; it’s a probability. Attackers don’t need to break down the door, they’ll trick someone into opening it. As ransomware groups' tactics, techniques, and procedures become more sophisticated with Gen AI, leveraging every possible attack vector from social engineering to supply chain vulnerabilities, businesses must raise their defenses accordingly. Failure to do so invites devastating losses that no company can afford.