The Resilience Factor: Breaking Down the BridgePay Ransomware Attack

By Kate O'Flaherty • 26 March 2026 • 6 min read

Operational shutdown is the last thing any business wants, but it is a very real risk during a ransomware attack. This is a lesson US payment gateway provider BridgePay learnt the hard way.

By Kate O’Flaherty

In February, US payment gateway provider BridgePay was hit by a ransomware attack that knocked key systems offline, triggering a widespread outage.

The incident had a ripple effect, disrupting many of BridgePay’s customers for weeks. Restaurants and retailers were forced to tell customers they could no longer accept card payments, while the City of Palm Bay, Florida’s online billing payment portal was kicked offline.

The BridgePay outage was a lesson in the importance of resilience, especially in critical sectors such as finance. “The attack was an operational shutdown,” Oliver Newbury, chief strategy officer at Halcyon says. “That tells you resilience either was not designed for this scenario or had not been properly exercised.”

Textbook Ransomware

It comes at a time when ransomware resilience is on the agenda, with a UK ban on payments for critical national infrastructure and public sector organisations on the horizon. Verizon’s Data Breach Investigations report found businesses detected ransomware in 44% of all cyber-attacks.

Meanwhile, 19% of respondents to IO’s State of Information Security report said they had experienced a ransomware incident in the past 12 months.

Where a significant proportion of organisations have experienced attacks, often involving data encryption and extortion, the costs escalate dramatically when response and recovery are ad hoc rather than planned.

In BridgePay’s case, the incident itself was “a textbox ransomware attack”, says Harry Mason, head of client services at IT managed service provider Mason Infotech. “A user identity was compromised, services were switched off by the attacker, and a ransom was demanded for recovery. This resulted in the platform being down for three weeks before it was fully operational again.”

Yet while customer card details remained safe, the costs of the incident piled up quickly. “A lot of time and money was spent employing the forensic, recovery and security specialist teams needed to get back online,” Mason points out.

Ransomware attacks like the one that hit BridgePay succeed and cause disruption because of gaps in oversight, says Rob O’Connor, EMEA CISO at Insight. “This includes unclear accountability, under-tested recovery plans, weak supplier risk management and insufficient scrutiny of cyber resilience.”

Systemic Risk

In many organisations, gaps between cybersecurity, business continuity and compliance functions are creating systemic exposure. The problem grows when these functions sit side by side, rather than being fully integrated, according to Halcyon’s Newbury.

Trouble often shows up “at the edges between teams”, Stewart Parkin, global CTO at Assured Data Protection tells IO. “Security wants to isolate and contain. Continuity wants to bring systems back quickly. Compliance wants accurate reporting and regulator notifications. If those conversations haven’t happened before an incident, they’ll collide during one.”

It is only when ransomware strikes that the disconnect becomes obvious, Newbury agrees. “Decision rights blur, priorities clash and escalation routes stall. The result is that downtime drags on, not because the technology cannot be restored, but because the organisation was not aligned to respond.”

In the case of BridgePay, where ransomware quite literally took the business and its customers offline, it shows why downtime in payment systems is now viewed as a systemic risk, with regulatory and reputational implications.

The BridgePay incident had such a large impact because “just a handful of key players” now support “a significant proportion” of global digital payments, says Luke Fardell, lead cyber analyst in cyber underwriting at Tokio Marine Kiln.

This means a single disruption “can cascade across multiple sectors and industries at once”, potentially affecting retailers, utilities, public services and small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs), Fardell explains.

As regulators seek to avoid this level of disruption in critical industries, legislation is increasingly mandating measures beyond simply preventing attacks. “Someone can have excellent firewalls and still end up offline,” points out Assured Data Protection’s Parkin. “What they now want to see is proof you can recover, properly and within defined timeframes.”

The EU’s Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) regulation is a key example. The regulation mandates that businesses, such as banks and insurance companies, must demonstrate that they can recover to a state of business as usual within a set time frame.

“A key component of this is undergoing regular stress testing that holds them to specific ‘return to operation’ and ‘restore point objective’ targets,” explains Mason Infotech’s Mason.

Structured, Board-Visible Resilience Governance.

The BridgePay incident and cascading fall-out shows the very real costs of downtime as a result of ransomware attacks. To avoid a similar fate, financial infrastructure environments must now create structured, board-visible resilience governance.

In plain terms, this requires the board to understand exactly which services matter most and how long they can afford them to be down, according to Assured Data Protection’s Parkin. “It means dependencies are mapped properly, recovery is tested regularly, and suppliers are held to clear resilience standards. Decision-making must be rehearsed, not improvised.”

For optimum results, training is crucial, encompassing “the full breadth of the business”, says Mason Infotech’s Mason. C-suite should know what is expected of them and how to action it, he says, adding that “everyone must understand supply chain risks”, with “particular attention on tier-1 dependencies and the failover plan in the event they go down”.

At the same time, frameworks such as ISO 27001 can help firms identify, assess, and address potential threats, ensuring robust protection of sensitive data and adherence to international standards.

Regular reporting and assessment of risks is key to ensuring a business is ready to get back online if they are “subject to a ransomware attack tomorrow”, Mason adds. “This looks like putting RTO and RPO timelines in place and testing them regularly to check they are achievable. In the event of an attack, there must also be a system in place for incident reporting.”

There are multiple lessons to be learned from the BridgePay incident, but ultimately, it is a reminder that ransomware is no longer just about encrypted files, says Halcyon’s Newbury. “In payment environments, it is a direct test of whether governance and recovery are strong enough to keep the business standing when prevention fails.”