Ransomware Trends: A 2026 Outlook

Ransomware remains the most financially impactful category of cybercrime, with estimated global losses exceeding $30 billion in 2025. The threat continues to evolve in sophistication, business model, and targeting strategy. This outlook examines the key trends shaping the ransomware landscape as we enter 2026.

The Shift to Double and Triple Extortion

Traditional ransomware — encrypting data and demanding payment for the decryption key — is increasingly supplemented or replaced by extortion-centric approaches. In 2025, 78% of ransomware incidents tracked by our threat intelligence team involved data exfiltration prior to encryption, with the threat of public data release used as additional leverage.

A growing number of groups have abandoned encryption entirely, focusing exclusively on data theft and extortion. This approach is operationally simpler, faster to execute, and often more effective at motivating payment — organisations may be willing to accept the downtime associated with restoring from backups but are less willing to accept the reputational and regulatory consequences of a data breach.

Ransomware-as-a-Service Maturation

The ransomware-as-a-service model continues to mature, with leading groups operating sophisticated affiliate programmes that provide access to malware, infrastructure, negotiation services, and even customer support. These programmes have lowered the barrier to entry for ransomware operations significantly — an affiliate with minimal technical skills can launch a sophisticated ransomware campaign using tools and playbooks provided by the RaaS operator.

The most concerning development is the specialisation within these ecosystems. Initial access brokers sell pre-established footholds in target organisations. Ransomware operators provide the encryption and extortion infrastructure. Negotiation specialists handle victim communication. Money laundering services convert cryptocurrency payments to fiat currency. This division of labour increases the efficiency and resilience of the overall ecosystem.

Targeting Evolution

Ransomware groups are increasingly strategic in their targeting, focusing on sectors where disruption creates maximum urgency to pay: healthcare, education, critical infrastructure, and legal services. We observed a particular increase in attacks targeting managed service providers, which offer the prospect of compromising multiple downstream organisations through a single intrusion.

The trend toward big-game hunting — targeting large organisations with substantial revenues — continues, with average ransom demands increasing to $2.1 million in 2025. However, we also observe a parallel trend of high-volume, lower-demand campaigns targeting small and medium enterprises that lack the security resources to defend against or recover from an attack.

Defensive Recommendations

Immutable backups are essential. Organisations must maintain backup systems that cannot be compromised even if the attacker has full administrative access to the primary network. Air-gapped or immutable cloud backups should be tested regularly to ensure they support rapid recovery.

Network segmentation limits blast radius. Proper network segmentation prevents a single compromised system from providing access to the entire network. Particular attention should be paid to segmenting backup infrastructure, domain controllers, and systems containing sensitive data.

Endpoint detection and response is foundational. EDR platforms that can detect and respond to ransomware behaviour patterns — such as rapid file encryption or mass file access — provide a critical window for intervention between initial compromise and full encryption.

Incident response planning saves time and money. Organisations with tested incident response plans consistently achieve faster recovery times and lower total costs than those that improvise their response. Plans should include clear decision-making frameworks for ransom payment decisions, communication templates, and pre-established relationships with incident response firms and law enforcement.

Conclusion

The ransomware ecosystem shows no signs of contracting. While law enforcement actions have disrupted individual groups, the RaaS model ensures that new groups emerge rapidly to fill any vacuum. The most effective defence remains a combination of robust preventive controls, comprehensive detection capabilities, and thoroughly tested recovery procedures.