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Ransomware is one of the most persistent threats in the evolving landscape of cybercrime, but its escalation in 2024 has marked an extremely alarming turning point. Infiltrating hospitals, financial institutions, and even government agencies in a manner that has never been attempted before, attackers extended their reach with unprecedented precision, as if they were no longer restricted to high-profile corporations. These sectors tend to be vulnerable to such crippling disruptions in the first place.
As cybercriminals employed stronger encryption methods and more aggressive extortion tactics, they demonstrated a ruthless pursuit of maximising damages and financial gain. This shift is demonstrated in the newly released data from threat intelligence firm Flashpoint, which reveals that the number of ransomware attacks observed in the first half of 2025 increased by 179 per cent in comparison to 2024 during the same period, almost tripling in size in just a year.
Throughout the years 2022 and 2023, the ransomware landscape offered little relief due to the relentless escalation of threat actors’ tactics. As a result of the threat of public exposure and data infiltration, attackers increasingly used threats of data infiltration to force companies to conform to regulations.
Even companies that managed to restore their operations from backups were not spared, as sensitive information was often leaking onto underground forums and leak sites controlled by criminal groups, which led to an increase in ransomware incidence of 13 per cent in 2021 compared to 2021 – an increase far greater than the cumulative increases of the past five years combined.
Verizon’s Data Breach Investigations Report underscored the severity of this trend.
It is important to note that Statista has predicted that about 70 per cent of businesses will face at least one ransomware attack in 2022, marking the highest rate of ransomware attacks ever recorded. In the 2022 year-over-year analysis, it was highlighted that education, government, and healthcare were the industries with the greatest impact in 2022.
By 2023, healthcare will emerge as one of the most targeted sectors due to attackers' calculated strategy to target industries that are least able to sustain prolonged disruption.
In light of the ongoing ransomware crisis, small and mid-sized businesses are considered to be some of the most vulnerable targets.
As part of Verizon’s research, 832 ransomware-related incidents were documented by small businesses by 2022, 130 of these incidents resulted in confirmed data loss, and nearly 80 per cent of these events were directly related to the ransomware attacks.
In an effort to compound the risks, the fact that only half of U.S. small businesses maintain a formal cybersecurity plan, according to a report quoted by UpCity Globally, amplifies the risks.
A survey conducted by Statista found that 72 per cent of businesses were impacted by ransomware, with 64.9% of those organisations ultimately yielding to ransom demands.
In a recent survey of 1,500 cybersecurity professionals conducted by Cyberreason, there was a similar picture of concern. More than two-thirds of all organisations reported experiencing a ransomware attack, a 33 per cent increase over the previous year, with almost two-thirds of the attacks associated with compromised third parties.
The consequences for organisations were severe and went beyond financial losses in the most significant way.
Approximately 40% of companies had to lay off employees following an attack, 35 percent reported resignations of senior executives, and one third temporarily suspended operations as a result of an attack.
Unfortunately, the persistence of attackers within networks often went undetected for long periods of time. There was a reported 63 per cent of organisations that had been attacked for as long as six months, and others reported that they had been accessed for a period of over a year without being noticed.
The majority of companies decided to pay ransoms despite the risks involved, with 49 per cent doing so to avoid revenue losses and 41 per cent to speed up recovery.
In spite of this, even payment provided no guarantee of data recovery; over half of all companies paying ransom reported corrupted or unusable data after the decryption, while the majority of financial damages were between $1 million and $10 million. The use of generative artificial intelligence within ransomware operations is also an emerging concern.
Even though the scope of these experiments remains limited, some groups have begun to explore large language models that have the potential to reduce operational burdens, such as automating the generation of phishing templates.To develop a more comprehensive understanding of this capability, researchers have identified Funksec, a group that surfaced in late 2024 and is believed to have contributed to the WormGPT model, as one of the first groups to experiment with it, so more gangs will likely start incorporating artificial intelligence into their tactics in the near future.
Furthermore, analysts at Flashpoint found that gang members are recycling victims from other ransomware groups in order to gain a foothold on underground forums, long after initial breaches. The first half of 2025 has been dominated by a few particularly active operators based on scale: 537 attacks were committed by Akira, 402 attacks were committed by Clop/Cl0p, 345 attacks were committed by Qilin, 233 attacks were committed by Safepay Ransomware, and 23 attacks were performed by RansomHub.
A significant amount of attention has also been drawn to DragonForce in the United Kingdom after the company targeted household names, including Marks & Spencer and the Co-op Group. Despite being the top target, the United States remained the most vulnerable, with 2,160 attacks, far exceeding Canada’s 249 attacks, Germany’s 154 attacks, and the UK’s 148 attacks—but Brazil, Spain, France, India, and Australia also had high numbers.
A perspective from the manufacturing and technology industries indicates that these were the industries that were most lucrative, causing 22 and 18 per cent of incidents, respectively. Retail, healthcare, and business services, on the other hand, accounted for 15 per cent. The report also highlighted how the boundaries between hacktivist groups and state-sponsored actors are becoming increasingly blurred, thus illustrating the complexity of today's threat environment.
During the first half of 2025, 137 threat actor activities tracked were attributed to state-sponsored groups, 9 per cent to hacktivists, while the remaining 51 per cent were attributed to cybercriminal organisations. The Iranian government has shown that a growing focus has been placed on critical infrastructure through entities affiliated with the Iranian state, such as GhostSec and Arabian Ghosts.
In an attempt to target critical infrastructure, these entities are reported to have targeted programmable logic controllers connected to Israeli media and water systems.
As a result, groups such as CyberAv3ngers sought to spread unverified narratives in advance of disruptive technology attacks. As a result, state-aligned operations are often resurfacing under a new identity, such as APT IRAN, demonstrating their shifting strategies and adaptive nature.
There is a sobering picture of the challenges that lie ahead in light of the increase in ransomware activity as well as the diversification of threat actors. Even though no sector, geography, or organisation size is immune to disruption, it appears that cybercriminals will be able to innovate more rapidly than ever, as well as utilise state-linked tactics to do so in the future, which indicates that the stakes will only get higher as time goes on.
Proactively managing security goes beyond ensuring compliance or minimising damage; it involves cultivating a culture of security that anticipates threats rather than reacts to them, rather than merely reacting to them.
By investing in modern defences like continuous threat intelligence, real-time monitoring, and zero-trust architectures, as well as addressing fundamental weaknesses in supply chains and third-party partnerships, which frequently open themselves up to attacks, companies can significantly reduce their risk exposure as well as their vulnerability to attacks.
Moreover, it is equally important to address the human aspect of cybersecurity resilience: employees must be aware, incidents should be reported quickly, and leadership needs to be committed to cybersecurity resilience.
Even though the outlook may seem daunting, organisations that make sure they are prepared rather than complacent will have a better chance of dealing with ransomware as well as the wider range of cyber threats that are reshaping the digital age. A resilient security approach remains the ultimate defence in an environment defined by a persistent attacker and the innovative actions of the attacker.
