Tulsa International Airport confirmed it was the target of a cybersecurity attack that likely involved ransomware. The broader context of this incident is sobering. Ransomware attacks now strike businesses globally every few seconds, with industry reports estimating that over 70% of organizations have faced ransomware attempts in recent years. Global ransomware damages are projected in the tens of billions of dollars annually, with ransom payments, downtime, recovery costs, and reputational harm compounding the impact.

Critical infrastructure — including airports, hospitals, utilities, and municipalities — has become a prime target due to operational urgency and public visibility. Modern ransomware campaigns escalate rapidly, often moving from initial compromise to widespread encryption in a matter of hours, while leveraging double-extortion tactics to increase pressure.

Defending against this threat requires more than isolated endpoint or firewall tools — it demands unified endpoint and network monitoring. A comprehensive platform, like NIKSUN, must be leveraged to correlate endpoint telemetry (process execution, file changes, registry activity), network traffic (lateral movement, command-and-control callbacks, unusual data transfers), authentication logs, and behavioral anomalies in real time.

By unifying endpoint detection with network visibility, security teams can identify how the infection entered the network (phishing, exposed service, compromised credentials), what the malware executed on the host, and how it is attempting to propagate to other systems. Remediation can then be orchestrated automatically: blocking the initial malicious payload, terminating malicious processes, isolating the compromised endpoint from the network, and preventing lateral spread. In today’s ransomware landscape, only an integrated platform that combines endpoint intelligence with deep network visibility can stop attacks before they escalate. Read more about this story on our LinkedIn page