A small print shop exchanges documents with customers by email, a web upload/download gateway and an FTP server, all hosted on site, and management fears a ransomware attack. What needs protecting?

Customer data, especially address lists for mailings (personal data); the print shop's IT systems (the gateway, FTP server, mail server); the production machines such as printing presses; intellectual property in designs, print templates and orders; and licensed fonts, colours and similar assets.

* Personal data, systems, machines and intellectual property all sit behind the same file exchange. *

The case: print shop D produces brochures, flyers, posters, magazines, books, mail merges and greeting cards, for businesses and also for private people (wedding or mourning cards). Authors deliver PDFs; professional designers send Adobe InDesign files (.indd) or PDFs; mailings come with CSV files of recipients. Documents are rarely print-ready, so corrected versions go back and forth several times. Servers, staff PCs and Macs, and the printing presses share one network. There has never been a security concept, and the budget and resources are limited.

Ransomware matters here because every exchanged file is a possible carrier, and one encrypted network would stop both the office and the presses.

Go deeper:

• Ransomware — Wikipedia — the threat behind the print shop's worry.
• NCSC — Mitigating malware and ransomware attacks — the defences, including filtering and segmentation, in one guide.