“Don’t Make It Easy for Them”: The Four Basics Lower the Odds, Recovery Readiness Decides the Outcome

This October, the National Cybersecurity Alliance (NCA) wants people and organizations to make life difficult for cybercriminals. Its 2026 Cybersecurity Awareness Month theme, “Don’t Make It Easy for Them,” frames online safety as a set of habits repeated in small, everyday moments, and it names four places to start: NCA co-leads the campaign with CISA, the U.S. federal cyber defense agency, which runs its own 2026 theme, “Securing the Next 250.” Security leaders should back the NCA message without reservation. Attackers take the easy path, and these four habits close the easiest ones. Fresh incident data proves the point. The data points somewhere else too. Prevention lowers the odds of a damaging attack. It does not set the outcome. The outcome depends on what an organization can restore, how fast it can restore it, and whether it can prove the restored systems are clean. On that second question, the latest numbers from Coveware by Veeam carry a clear message: the organizations with the most options after an attack are the ones that built recovery readiness long before it. Coveware by Veeam published its Q2 2026 ransomware report on July 29. It…