Hypervisor Ransomware Attacks Surge as Threat Actors Shift Focus to Virtual Infrastructure

 

Hypervisors have emerged as a highly important, yet insecure, component in modern infrastructural networks, and attackers have understood this to expand the reach of their ransomware attacks. It has been observed by the security community that the modes of attack have changed, where attackers have abandoned heavily fortified devices in favor of the hypervisor, the platform through which they have the capability to regulate hundreds of devices at one time. In other words, a compromised hypervisor forms a force multiplier in a ransomware attack. 

Data from Huntress on threat hunting indicates the speed at which this trend is gathering pace. Initially in the early part of 2025, hypervisors were involved in just a few percent of ransomware attacks. However, towards the latter part of the year, this number had risen substantially, with hypervisor-level encryption now contributing towards a quarter of these attacks. This is largely because the Akira ransomware group is specifically leveraging vulnerabilities within virtualized infrastructure.  

Hypervisors provide attackers the opportunity by typically residing outside the sight of traditional security software. For this reason, bare-metal hypervisors are of particular interest to attackers since traditional security software cannot be set up on these environments. Attacks begin after gaining root access, and the attackers will be able to encrypt the disks on the virtual machines. Furthermore, attackers will be able to use the built-in functions to execute the encryption process without necessarily setting up the ransomware. 

In this case, security software would be rendered unable to detect the attacks. These attacks often begin with loopholes in credentials and network segmentation. With the availability of Hypervisor Management Interfaces on the larger internets inside organizations, attackers can launch lateral attacks when they gain entry and gain control of the virtualization layer. Misuse of native management tools has also been discovered by Huntress for adjusting Machine Settings, degrading defenses, and preparing the environment for massive Ransomware attacks. 

Additionally, the increased interest in hypervisors has emphasized that this layer must be afforded the equivalent security emphasis on it as for servers and end-points. Refined access controls and proper segmentation of management networks are required to remediate this. So too is having current and properly maintained patches on this infrastructure, as it has been shown to have regularly exploited vulnerabilities for full administrative control and rapid encryption of virtualized environments. While having comprehensive methods in place for prevention, recovery planning is essential in this scenario as well. 

A hypervisor-based ransomware is meant for environments, which could very well go down, hence the need for reliable backups, ideally immutables. This is especially true for organizations that do not have a recovery plan in place. As ransomware threats continue to evolve and become more sophisticated, the role of hypervisors has stepped up to become a focal point on the battlefield of business security. 

This is because by not securing and protecting the hypervisor level against cyber threats, what a business will essentially present to the cyber attackers is what they have always wanted: control of their whole operation with a mere click of their fingers.