Ransomware Statistics 2025: Trends, Costs, and Key Threats

• Unprecedented Attack Frequency: Ransomware incidents accelerated to record levels. By mid 2025, new ransomware victims were appearing at 520–540 per month, double the rate from early 2024. Projections suggest around 11,000 ransomware attack attempts per day globally by late 2025, a 3,500% increase over five years. Security researchers observed that by Q3 2025, there was effectively one ransomware attack every few seconds worldwide, creating a continuous siege on organizations.
• Soaring Volume, Declining Success: There is a Volume vs. Value paradox. Attack volumes are at all time highs +34% YoY, yet threat actors are struggling to monetize. The payment rate, the percentage of victims paying ransoms collapsed to 25–30% in 2024/2025, down from 85% in 2019. In Q3 2025 it hit a historic low of 23% as more victims refuse to pay. Attackers are responding with high volume, low yield campaigns and selectively targeting big fish that might pay large sums.
• Global Market Correction in Ransoms: Total ransomware payments fell 35% from $1.1B in 2023 to $813M in 2024. The median ransom demand dropped 34% from $2.0M in 2024 to $1.32M in 2025, and the median payment plummeted 50% to about $1.0M in 2025 vs $2.0M prior year. In Q4 2024, the median payment was only $110,890 –45% from Q1 2024. However, average ransom payments spiked to $2M in 2024 5× higher than 2023 due to a few outsized mega payouts e.g. one $75M payment. This reflects a bifurcated market: most attacks yield small payments or none, while a handful of whale victims pay huge sums.
• Extortion Value Erodes: Paying ransom is increasingly seen as futile. Only 46% of ransom paying victims got their data fully restored, often still partially corrupted. Many decryption tools are buggy, and only 4% of companies that paid recovered all data intact the rest lost some data highlighting that criminals rarely uphold customer service. Moreover, 80% of organizations that paid were hit again, often within weeks. This erosion of trust and fear of double cross is driving non payment.
• Backup Resilience vs. Data Theft: The vast majority 97% of organizations now can recover data from backups when ransomware encrypts files. This has largely neutralized the encryption threat. However, attackers have doubled down on data theft exfiltration prior to encryption. In Q3 2025, 76% of attacks involved data theft. Pure data extortion attacks stealing sensitive data without encryption grew, though only 19% of those victims paid, many doubt hackers will really delete stolen data. Thus, while backups mitigate downtime, ransomware is evolving into data breaches to pressure victims via leaks.
• Ransomware Industrial Complex Shifts: The once dominant cartels e.g. LockBit, BlackCat were disrupted in 2024, splintering the ecosystem. LockBit’s share fell from 34% in 2023 to 8% in 2024 after law enforcement crackdowns. Newer groups Qilin and RansomHub surged, and Lone wolf independent hackers doubled their market share 15% of attacks. The threat landscape is now highly fragmented, with many small groups and insider recruitment on the rise e.g. Medusa ransomware bribing a BBC employee for network access. Attackers are also diversifying tactics cloud based attacks, exploit chains, AI driven social engineering to bypass hardened defenses.
• Top Targeted Sectors: Manufacturing remained the #1 attacked industry 26% of incidents for the 4th year, due to high downtime costs $260K/hour and vulnerable OT systems. Healthcare faced relentless attacks estimated 67% of orgs hit in 2024 25 with the highest breach costs $10M+ per incident due to sensitive data and patient safety pressures. Education and Government also saw high attack rates but lower payment rates e.g., government agencies only paid in 34% of cases many are legally barred from paying despite demands often $5–6M. Financial services had some of the largest ransoms, median $2M but are less likely to pay if recovery is possible.
• Regional Differences: North America is the top target, with 47% of all ransomware attacks in 2023 24 hitting the U.S. and Canada. U.S. breach costs are highest globally averaging $10.22M in 2025. Europe saw the fastest growth in attacks in early 2025 +22% YoY in Q2, especially in Western Europe UK, Germany. Strong GDPR driven security helped Europe achieve higher data recovery rates e.g. Germany 79% vs global 70%. Latin America experienced an explosion in ransomware, with a 108% YoY surge in weekly attacks in Q1 2025 as attackers shifted toward softer targets. Asia Pacific accounted for 10–15% of attacks, led by Japan high tech manufacturing, though ransom demands there tend to be lower. Geopolitical factors also played a role: state aligned Russian gangs used ransomware/wiper attacks against Ukraine and NATO allies as part of hybrid warfare.
• AI and Automation in Play: Attackers are weaponizing AI. A notorious 2024 case saw hackers use deepfake video conferencing to impersonate a CFO and trick a Hong Kong finance employee into transferring $25M Arup engineering firm heist. Shadow AI employees using unsanctioned AI tools introduced new risks 1 in 5 organizations had a breach linked to shadow AI data exposure, adding $670K to breach costs. On the flip side, defenders using AI based detection reduced average breach costs per record $128 vs $234 without AI. Attackers also increasingly automate initial access botnets scanning for vulnerabilities 24/7 and leverage Ransomware as a Service platforms, enabling 11,000+ automated attacks per day at minimal cost.

Ransomware in 2025 reached an inflection point. The frequency of attacks hit unprecedented highs, yet financial returns for cybercriminals dwindled. This report analyzes the Global Ransomware Statistics for 2025, providing a data driven deep dive into how ransomware operations have evolved and what it means for organizations’ risk. We focus on real numbers and trends from attack counts and payment rates to sector impacts and regional shifts to cut through hype with evidence.

Why 2025? The past year saw a watershed market correction in the ransomware ecosystem. Companies hardened their defenses and grew more willing to withstand disruptions rather than pay extortion. Law enforcement takedowns fractured big ransomware cartels. Threat actors in turn adopted spray and pray volume tactics and pursued fewer bigger payouts, fundamentally altering ransomware’s economics. Understanding the statistics from this period is critical: it reveals which security investments are paying off e.g. backups, where adversaries are pivoting cloud, data theft, insider collusion, and how the geographical and industry risk landscape is changing.

Some headline numbers underscore this shift. From January to September 2025, there were 4,701 confirmed ransomware incidents globally, a 34% increase over the same period in 2024. Yet despite more attacks, total ransomware revenues fell by over one third year on year. The ransom payment rate dropped to roughly one in four victims, an all time low. In parallel, the average downtime and recovery costs from ransomware now often exceed the ransom itself, averaging 24–27 days of disruption and $5–6M in incident costs per attack. These statistics matter because they highlight a pivotal trend: ransomware is becoming less profitable for attackers and more about causing maximum havoc.

In the following sections, we break down what ransomware statistics entail, key global metrics for 2024–2025, cost analyses, attack vectors, industry specific impacts, regional trends, major incidents of the year, emerging threats like cloud ransomware and AI driven scams, and practical takeaways. All data is sourced from credible security research IBM, Verizon, Coveware, Sophos, etc. to provide an authoritative view of the ransomware threat landscape in 2025.

What Are Ransomware Statistics?

Ransomware statistics refer to the empirical data and metrics that describe the occurrence, impact, and characteristics of ransomware attacks. In simple terms, they are the numbers behind the news: how often attacks happen, how much money is demanded or paid, how long systems stay down, which tactics are most common, and who gets hit the most. Think of it as the vital signs of the global cyber extortion epidemic. Just as epidemiologists track infection rates and mortality percentages during a health crisis, cybersecurity analysts track ransomware frequencies, success rates, and costs to gauge the severity of the threat and the effectiveness of defenses.

For example, one key ransomware statistic is the attack frequency e.g., X attacks per day or one attack every Y seconds. In 2025, this metric reached staggering levels: roughly 4,000 attacks per day were estimated in 2023, and that pace only increased in 2024–25. By projection, an attack could occur every 2 seconds by 2031 if trends continue. Another statistic is the payment rate what percentage of victims pay the ransom. This has historically been high most victims paid, but as noted, it’s plummeted to roughly one quarter in recent data. Then there are cost statistics: average ransom demand, median payment, total damages including downtime. These help organizations quantify risk e.g., If we get hit, what’s the likely cost?.

To illustrate with an analogy: if ransomware attacks were hurricanes, then ransomware statistics are the hurricane scale readings wind speed, category, damage estimates. They tell us how strong the storm is each year. A stat like Average ransom payment = $376,000 in Q3 2025 or Data exfiltration occurred in 76% of attacks is akin to saying a hurricane had 150 mph winds or dumped 20 inches of rain. It quantifies the impact.

Why are these statistics important in 2025? Because they capture a moment of rapid change. Many organizations in recent years invested heavily in anti ransomware measures, better backups, incident response plans, etc.. Meanwhile, ransomware gangs evolved their tactics like double extortion and cloud based attacks. The stats show which side is winning. Spoiler: defenders are making headway seen in falling payments and shorter recovery times, but attackers are countering with brute force volume and novel tricks. Understanding ransomware statistics enables security leaders and analysts to base their strategies on facts, not fear allocating resources to the biggest risk areas and measuring if we’re truly reducing the threat over time.

Global Overview of Ransomware 2024–2025

Ransomware by the Numbers Global Trends: The table below summarizes high level global ransomware metrics, comparing the year 2024 to 2025 latest projections/estimates, along with the trend direction:

Sources: Global incident counts from analyst telemetry, payment rates from Coveware/Sophos, attack frequency from Check Point Research, ransom amounts from Sophos and Chainalysis.

As the table shows, 2025 continued the explosion in ransomware activity. The sheer number of attacks surged some quarters saw 80–130% increases in ransomware incidents year over year. By Q3 2025, an organization somewhere falls victim to ransomware roughly every 19 seconds on average, contributing to a global cadence of thousands of attacks per day. This reflects the near automation of ransomware campaigns via botnets and Initial Access Brokers scanning for any foothold. One security report noted the global average was 1,984 attacks per week per organization in Q2 2025 across all attack types, a 21% YoY increase in general cyberattacks, with ransomware a major component.

However, beneath the rising volume, the success rate for attackers is declining. The data confirms a decoupling of attack volume from revenue. Despite thousands more attacks, far fewer victims are caving in to demands. By late 2024, only 25% of victims were paying ransoms, versus 85% just a few years prior. In Coveware’s Q3 2025 dataset, the payment rate hit 23%, a historic low. This collapse is largely due to companies refusing on principle backed by better recovery options and law enforcement guidance. For example, IBM’s 2025 data breach report noted 63% of ransomware victims refused to pay in 2025, up from 59% in 2024. Essentially, 3 out of 5 to 3 out of 4 organizations now choose data recovery over ransom payment, choking off criminal profits.

Correspondingly, total ransom revenue fell. After cresting above $1 billion in 2023, cybercriminal earnings from ransomware dropped to $813M in 2024, and were on track to drop further in 2025. Blockchain tracing by Chainalysis showed this stark decline even though the number of incidents hit a record. The average ransom paid jumped because the distribution skewed toward a few large extortions the average in 2024 was $2.0M, up 5× from 2023, with some multi-tens of million payouts. But the median payment more representative of a typical case fell sharply to six figures. These statistics paint a picture of an arms race attackers hit more targets hoping someone will pay, while defenders improve such that fewer yield.

Another global trend was the shrinking dwell time time hackers lurk before detonating ransomware versus persistent long recoveries. By 2025, many ransomware actors execute encryption quickly once in median dwell times reported around 12 days some as low as a few days. They know incident responders are faster at detection. But even when caught swiftly, the remediation still causes weeks of downtime. Government stats show public sector victims averaging 27 days of disrupted operations. The private sector averages 23 days of downtime. So while backups and incident response might avoid paying ransoms, business continuity still suffers for about a month on average per attack. This is why ransomware remains a top concern even unsuccessful extortion attempts can be enormously costly in terms of operational outage, cleanup, and legal/regulatory fallout.

In summary, the global ransomware statistics for 2024–25 indicate record breaking attack activity but also signs of attacker overreach. The cybercrime economy is being forced to adapt to a tougher market of victims. Next, we’ll examine the financial side in more detail, costs and payments followed by how these attacks are getting in vectors and who is getting hit the hardest industries, regions.

Cost Breakdown: Ransomware’s Financial Impact

One of the most critical aspects of ransomware statistics is the cost not only the ransom amounts, but the full cost of an incident. This includes business downtime, recovery expenses, lost revenues, regulatory fines, and long term reputation damage. In 2025, while ransom demands and payments tell one story extortion pricing and trends, the all-in cost of ransomware incidents often far exceeds the ransom itself. Here we break down key cost metrics:

Sources: Coveware Q4 2024 and Q3 2025 reports for payments, Sophos 2025 report for median demands, Chainalysis/DeepStrike for total payouts, LinkedIn/Palo Alto analysis for total incident cost, IBM 2025 Cost of Data Breach for breach costs, TotalAssure for per record figures.

Several insights emerge from the above figures:

• Ransom demands are adjusting downwards for the mid market, but remain astronomical for large enterprises. In 2021–22, it was not uncommon to see demands of $10M+ even for mid size firms. By 2024–25, many ransomware groups realized companies simply won’t pay those amounts. As a result, the median demanded ransom dropped to about $1–2M. Attackers increasingly ask for reasonable sums e.g. low hundreds of thousands to entice payment from smaller victims. However, for Fortune 500 scale targets, criminals still swing for the fences initial demands above $10M or even $50M have been reported. Over 63% of ransom demands in 2024 were $1M+, reflecting this big game hunting for those perceived able to pay.
• Ransom payments what victims actually pay have sharply decreased in typical cases. Coveware data shows median payments fell by 45% between early and late 2024. By 2025, half of paying victims were paying $140k or less. Many organizations now engage professional negotiators to drive the price down, it’s become standard to counter a ransom demand with a much lower offer. Sophos found 53% of companies that paid in 2025 negotiated a lower amount than initially demanded, and only 29% paid exactly what was first asked. Some even paid more after negotiation 18% ended up paying above the initial demand, possibly due to data being leaked or extra extortion, but the majority manage to get discounts. The net effect is attackers accepting smaller payments just to close the deal if they get anything at all.
• Total incident costs remain alarmingly high, often several times the ransom amount. An organization might avoid a $1M ransom payment by restoring from backups, but still incur $5M in losses from the event. According to one analysis, the average total cost of a ransomware attack in 2024 was $5.13M when you add up everything. This is projected to rise towards $6M as of 2025. The reasons are manifold: even without paying, companies spend on forensics, crisis management, customer notifications if data was stolen, overtime for IT staff rebuilding systems, possibly new hardware, and lost business during downtime. If data is exfiltrated, add legal fees, credit monitoring for affected individuals, and regulatory fines. Indeed, the downtime and recovery often inflict more financial pain than the ransom would have, which creates a tricky calculus for executives. It’s worth noting some firms still pay simply because they calculate that paying $500k might restore operations faster and ultimately save a few million in downtime but this gamble increasingly doesn’t pay off, as we’ll see in Section What These Statistics Mean.
• Insurance dynamics: Cyber insurance used to routinely cover ransom payments, essentially reimbursing victims who paid. This safety net has frayed. Many insurers in 2024–25 introduced exclusions or limits on ransom coverage. According to one report, 42% of organizations with cyber insurance said their policy covered only a small portion of the costs when a ransomware hit. Insurers are more likely to cover recovery services, incident response, data restoration but not the ransom itself, or only up to a sub limit. Additionally, if a victim does pay and seeks reimbursement, they face scrutiny. Some policies won’t pay if the ransomware gang is a sanctioned entity e.g., tied to North Korea or terrorists, and regulators have warned that paying could violate sanctions. Thus, companies are increasingly on their own financially, making them think twice before funding criminals. The result is a further push downward on payment rates.
• Cost per data breach and per record: Interestingly, IBM’s 2025 Cost of a Data Breach report showed a slight decrease in global average breach cost to $4.44M, the first drop in years. They attributed this to faster response times organizations detected and contained breaches quicker on average, limiting damage. However, the U.S. bucked this trend with breach costs hitting $10.22M on average, a record high. Ransomware likely contributes heavily to that U.S. figure since many of the costliest breaches in healthcare, financial services involved data encryption + theft scenarios that are expensive to resolve. The cost per compromised record in a breach ranged widely $128–$234 depending on whether AI tools helped catch it early or regulators discovered it late. Highly regulated data like healthcare and long response times drive per record costs higher.
• Ransomware’s return on investment: From the attacker’s perspective, the economics are getting worse. They have to execute maybe 3–4 attacks now to get one payout, and that payout is often smaller than before. From the defender’s perspective, however, the cost remains high even if you don’t pay but that cost is more predictable and goes toward recovery rather than criminal profit. This dynamic is arguably a win for the good guys: resources are spent strengthening the business and improving resilience and perhaps paying staff overtime or vendors, instead of funding more crime. The statistics suggest that if current trends continue, ransomware may become less financially attractive to criminals, potentially reducing the scale of operations. However, in the short term, we’re seeing the opposite criminals doing more attacks to make up for the lower conversion rate. This leads to a paradoxical scenario of more noise attacks but less yield per attack, which in turn could mean attackers take even more reckless approaches like mass attacks or aggressive targeting of critical infrastructure where impact is greatest.

In summary, the cost trend is a mixed bag: Ransom amounts are moderating and fewer ransoms are paid, but the impact costs of ransomware remain extremely high. This reinforces that preventing ransomware in the first place or detecting it early in the kill chain is far more cost effective than dealing with an incident, even if you don’t pay. Next, let’s examine how these ransomware incidents are occurring what entry points and tactics are most common in 2025.

Attack Vector Distribution in 2025

How are ransomware attackers breaching organizations? The attack vector refers to the initial entry method or vulnerability exploited. In 2025, the initial access vectors for ransomware are diversifying, but a few core avenues dominate: exploiting exposed remote services, phishing/social engineering, stolen credentials, and software vulnerabilities. We also see growing instances of insider help and novel cloud specific attacks like living off the cloud tactics. Below is a breakdown of major ransomware entry vectors and their prevalence:

Sources: Coveware and Sophos data on initial vectors, Coveware Q3 2025 for remote vs phishing stats, IBM X Force/Verizon for credential trends, Vectra/Cardiet for AWS S3 attack details, BBC report on Medusa insider bribe.

Overall, 2025 showed no single dominant attack vector instead, ransomware crews used a mix of methods, often blending them. A campaign might start with a phishing email that steals a VPN password, then use that for remote access. Was that phishing or credential abuse? It’s both. Coveware commented that the distinctions between intrusion types are increasingly blurred in modern ransomware incidents. Attackers exploit whatever weak link they find, whether human or technical.

A few notable tactics/trends deserve highlight:

• Living off the Land and Cloud: Attackers are increasingly using built in tools to carry out ransomware. For instance, in the Codefinger AWS S3 attacks observed in 2025, criminals with stolen cloud credentials used Amazon’s own storage encryption features SSE C to re-encrypt victim data with a secret key. They set lifecycle policies to auto delete the data, essentially holding the data hostage in the victim’s own cloud. Because no malware is installed, it evades antivirus/EDR. This is a harbinger of cloud native ransomware expect more of it as organizations migrate to cloud services.
• Exploit chaining on appliances: Many 2024–25 breaches involved chaining multiple vulnerabilities on network appliances e.g., an authentication bypass + code execution. One such case was Ivanti’s VPN appliances: threat groups chained an admin bypass bug with a remote code execution bug to drop webshells on Ivanti Sentry servers. This gave them immediate foothold inside corporate networks. Similar issues hit Fortinet and Palo Alto devices. The lesson: these edge devices need just as much patching and monitoring as Windows servers, yet they often aren’t instrumented with EDR, making them stealth entry points.
• Zero day mass exploits: The Cl0p gang’s spree with the MOVEit Transfer zero day CVE 2023 34362in mid 2023 signaled a shift instead of laboriously hacking one target, find a vulnerability in widely used third party software and breach dozens or hundreds at once. In 2024, we saw copycats trying similar with other enterprise apps e.g., file sharing services. Ransomware groups no longer just encrypt, they might purely steal data from these mass exploits and extort via leak threats sometimes called data ransom attacks. When successful, these events dramatically inflate the number of affected organizations in statistics.
• Social engineering 2.0: Basic phishing still works, but high tech social engineering emerged. The Arup deepfake case was essentially a fraud/wire transfer scam, not ransomware, but imagine the same concept with ransomware attackers could deepfake a CEO’s voice to tell IT staff to disable security systems or to convince an MSP to deploy a critical update which is actually ransomware. There’s at least one instance of attackers using video deepfakes of corporate executives to authorize unusual actions. This is a scary vector because it bypasses technical controls by manipulating trust at the human level. Security awareness training is evolving to warn: a video call isn’t proof someone is who they say they are anymore.
• Insider recruitment: As noted, 2025 saw perhaps the first publicly known example of a ransomware gang directly recruiting an insider, the Medusa BBC story. This tactic is likely a response to hardened external perimeters. Why spend weeks brute forcing a network when you might pay someone on the inside to open the door? The economic downturn and job uncertainties can unfortunately make some employees susceptible to such bribes. While still rare, even a handful of insider aided attacks can cause outsized damage and complicate incident response and attribution heavily.

Understanding these vectors is crucial for defense. The stats above show that focusing solely on one entry point e.g. just phishing training or just patching is insufficient. Ransomware crews will probe for any weakness: an unpatched server, an unwary employee, a misconfigured firewall, or a poorly monitored cloud account. A multilayered defense combining good identity management MFA, password managers, aggressive patching of external systems, robust email security, network segmentation, and monitoring for unusual activity is needed to tackle the top vectors collectively. We will revisit best practices in a later section.

Next, we examine which industries are bearing the brunt of ransomware attacks and how the impacts differ across sectors.

Industry Breakdown: Who’s Getting Hit and How

Ransomware is an equal opportunity menace, but not all industries suffer equally. Threat actors often prioritize certain sectors that promise bigger payoffs or are more likely to pay due to the nature of their operations. In 2025, data shows manufacturing, healthcare, education, government, and financial services among the top targets each for different reasons. Let’s dive into key industry stats and trends:

1. Manufacturing No Downtime Tolerated: For the fourth year in a row, manufacturing is the most targeted industry, accounting for about 26% of all ransomware attacks.

• Why so many attacks? Manufacturing companies operate high value production lines with just in time processes. Downtime costs average $260,000 per hour for factories when lines are idle, lost output, penalties for late delivery, etc.. Attackers know even a short disruption can cost millions, so they bet manufacturers will pay quickly to resume operations. Indeed, manufacturing had one of the highest ransom payment rates 62% of manufacturing victims paid in 2024 the logic being that paying a few hundred thousand might be worth it to avoid multi million losses from extended downtime.
• Impact and costs: While many manufacturers paid ransoms, it didn’t spare them pain. Over 70% of ransomware attacks on manufacturing result in data encryption since many OT systems can’t be quickly patched, they’re often successfully hit, and recovery is complex. The average downtime in manufacturing breaches was around 12 days, longer than some sectors because restoring specialized industrial systems isn’t trivial. The average total cost of a ransomware incident in manufacturing was estimated around $8.7M in 2024. Some high profile cases: in 2025, Jaguar Land Rover was hit by ransomware, disrupting multiple UK plants and reportedly costing £1.9B yes, billions in losses touted as perhaps the most economically damaging cyber event in UK history. That figure underscores how crippling a hit to manufacturing can be.
• Additional factor: Manufacturers often have older OT Operational Technology and ICS equipment that can’t be easily secured or taken offline for patches. This legacy tech is a big target. A Dragos report noted that 68% of ransomware incidents in industrial sectors hit manufacturing specifically.

2. Healthcare Lives on the Line: Hospitals and healthcare providers continued to be prime ransomware targets, with some surveys indicating over 65% of healthcare organizations were attacked in 2024/25 at least attempted.

• Why healthcare? Two reasons: sensitive data and urgency. Healthcare holds priceless patient data PHI protected health info and cannot afford downtime ERs and surgeries can’t be paused without risking lives. Attackers shamelessly leverage this. For instance, in late 2024, the ALPHV/BlackCat gang hit a major healthcare IT firm Change Healthcare that supports hospitals and pharmacies nationwide. They encrypted critical systems and demanded $25M. The company ended up paying $22M in ransom to restore operations, likely because patient care across many facilities was impacted. That was one of the largest healthcare ransom payments on record.
• Payment rate and costs: Healthcare entities, facing life and death stakes, have a relatively high tendency to pay around 53% paid ransoms in 2024. Yet they still suffered heavy losses. The average cost of a healthcare data breach is the highest of any industry, at about $10.93M per incident IBM’s 2023 report and even though IBM 2025 showed that number falling to $7.4M, it’s still #1 among industries. These costs include regulatory fines for exposing patient data under HIPAA, patient notification and credit monitoring, legal liabilities if care was delayed, etc. Also notable: 66% of healthcare victims had backups compromised during the attack per Veeam, meaning hospitals often had no choice but to consider paying since their backups weren’t safe. This is due to many hospitals having flat networks where ransomware spread to backup systems or attackers wiping backups intentionally.
• Real world impacts: A grim statistic: ransomware attacks on hospitals have been correlated with increases in patient mortality. Some studies found delayed treatments leading to excess deaths, though quantifying this is hard. While not statistics in the traditional sense, anecdotes abound like ambulances being diverted for weeks after an attack on a medical center. In 2025, a notable hit was on SimonMed Imaging Oct 2025 where Medusa ransomware stole data on 1.2 million patients and demanded $1M to delete it. In Germany, a 2020 hospital ransomware case even led to a homicide investigation after a patient died due to transfer delays, a wake up call that ransomware in healthcare can be literally deadly.

3. Education Schools & Universities Soft Targets, High Ransom Demands: The education sector from K 12 school districts to universities has been pummeled by ransomware. Over 60% of education organizations reported attacks in the past year.

• Why schools? Limited cybersecurity budgets + valuable personal data + high pressure to resolve before classes are disrupted. K 12 schools often store data on minors which is sensitive and may be protected by law but have small IT teams. Attackers see them as easy prey that may pay to avoid extended closures. Interestingly, the median ransom demand in K 12 education reached $6.6M in recent data, which is enormous, possibly because criminals assume the government might step in or that impact kids missing school might spur payment. This number seems like an outlier, but there have been cases of multi million demands on big school districts e.g., Los Angeles Unified was hit in 2022, hackers demanded $15M, though it wasn’t paid.
• Impact: Education had one of the highest total costs per incident averaging $14.2M in some analyses, surprisingly even higher than healthcare in that dataset. This might factor in the long tail of recovery, schools may have to rebuild entire networks from scratch and invest in improvements post incident. Downtime leads to canceled classes or a switch to pen and paper which affects thousands of students and parents.
• Trends: 2025 saw a spike in attacks on the education sector, partly attributed to GenAI malware and phishing kits that specifically targeted universities. Check Point noted education was the most attacked sector in Q2 2025 globally. Also, the prevalence of legacy systems and open access in academia makes it easier for threats to spread. Some stats: 66% of universities lacked basic email security like DMARC and 38% had at least one exposed database port essentially, many had their front door wide open. With such an attack surface, it’s no wonder education is hit frequently. The outcome is often sensitive student/employee data stolen, at least one ransomware leak site is known for dumping student psychological records and disciplinary files, causing huge privacy issues.

4. Financial Services Cash is King, but Data too: Banks, insurance companies, and investment firms are prime targets for obvious reasons they manage money. While financial services typically have stronger cybersecurity than say education, they are still hit. Roughly 64% of financial orgs were targeted in 2024/25.

• Ransom trends: Financial firms had comparatively lower payment rates 51% paid likely because they often have better incident response and also because regulators discourage paying. However, when they do get breached, attackers try to extort large sums. The median ransom paid in finance was about $2.0M in 2024, the highest among industries DeepStrike noted that finance pays the most on average. This may be skewed by some large payers for instance, in 2023 a major insurance company reportedly paid around $15M to a ransomware gang to get data back. Financial data is also extremely sensitive think: trading algorithms, M&A info, or simply millions of customers’ PII that could be used for fraud.
• Cost: Average breach cost in financial services was around $6M according to IBM, second only to healthcare. The high cost is partly due to regulatory fines e.g., GDPR fines in Europe for leaking customer financial info, or U.S. OCC fines for banks that get breached. Also, banks tend to have complex IT systems, so containment and cleanup are expensive.
• Notable cases: In 2025, a hacker group called Codebreakers hit Iran’s Bank Sepah, stealing 42 million customer records and demanding $42M ransom roughly $1 per record, interestingly. The bank did not pay and the data leak was an international incident. In the West, we didn’t see a megabank taken down, but several regional banks and credit unions were hit, and at least one major stock trading platform suffered a ransomware related outage.

5. Government To Pay or Not to Pay Legally Can’t: Government agencies local municipalities, state, and federal are consistent ransomware targets. About 68% of government organizations were targeted by ransomware in recent stats, slightly higher incidence than even other sectors.

• Payment rate: Government entities have the lowest ransom payment rate, around 34%. Many governments have policies or laws forbidding paying ransoms with taxpayer money e.g., in the U.S., some states like Florida and North Carolina ban it for state/local agencies. This means attackers know that if they hit a U.S. city or a European government office, the chance of payment is slim but some still try, either to cause disruption or steal data for espionage. Because of the low payment likelihood, we see longer recoveries in government. Example: when North Miami Beach was hit in 2024, they could not pay due to Florida law, and it took them many weeks to fully restore services, during which citizens experienced major delays in city services. The average downtime for government ransomware incidents was about 27.8 day salmost a month, the longest of any sector. They essentially have to rebuild from scratch or wait for decryptors from law enforcement, etc.
• Cost: Government ransomware costs excluding ransom can be quite high incident response, overtime for employees doing things manually, and sometimes purchasing emergency IT equipment. One analysis put the average recovery cost for government at $9.4M. But governments often operate at tight budgets, so these incidents can lead to budget crises or requests for emergency funds.
• Trends: A troubling trend is ransomware hits against critical public infrastructure e.g., attacks on water treatment plants, 911 dispatch systems, or transit authorities. In 2025, for instance, the Tax and Customs agency of Curaçao a government service was ransomwared, impacting tax collection and requiring international aid to resolve. Also, attackers sometimes hit governments to steal data rather than expecting payment for example, in Oct 2025 Russian linked hackers Lynx ransomwared a UK Ministry of Defence contractor Dodd Group and stole 4TB of military base data which they leaked partly. This was more espionage driven but used ransomware as a cover/tool.

6. Other sectors: Technology companies especially software providers were targeted for supply chain value. Retail was targeted for customer data and to disrupt e-commerce e.g., a 2025 attack on a major UK retailer knocked out online shopping for weeks, costing an estimated £300M in sales. Energy/Utilities also remain on the hit list, although energy companies often face destructive attacks by nation states disguised as ransomware like the 2023 Colonial Pipeline incident by DarkSide. In 2025 at least half of all ransomware attacks globally were assessed to have hit critical sectors manufacturing, healthcare, energy, underscoring the attackers’ focus on targets with outsized leverage.

Let’s compile a quick comparison table from cross industry data to summarize some key stats:

Sources: DeepStrike, Varonis, BrightDefense aggregated stats, IBM Cost of Data Breach 2023/2025.

It’s important to note: the attack rate percentages in the table mean e.g. 67% of healthcare orgs experienced at least one ransomware attack attempt in the period not that 67% of all attacks were on healthcare that global share was lower, around 11–15%. Manufacturing was 26% of attacks by share, healthcare 12%, finance 10%, etc..

Key industry insights:

• Manufacturing and healthcare are in a state of siege. These two sectors see the most relentless attacks for different reasons profits vs pressure. Any organization in these fields should assume they will be targeted continuously. Something like 4,388 attacks per week per healthcare org were recorded in one 2025 study, a staggering figure showing the constant bombardment.
• Public sector gov/edu faces resource vs. risk mismatch. Schools and municipalities have become favorite targets because attackers know they often run outdated systems and have small security teams, yet the impact of taking them out is very public and painful. The stats show extremely high costs when they are hit, which is paradoxical given their meager defenses it’s like causing maximum damage with minimal resistance.
• Financial and tech firms face sophisticated adversaries. These industries often are targeted by the more advanced ransomware groups or state sponsored actors due to the value of data. They might not have as many incidents as manufacturing since their defenses are stronger, but each incident can be a big one e.g., if a cloud provider is hit, it can affect hundreds of customers as we saw with supply chain.
• Ransomware is effectively a matter of national security in critical infrastructure. Energy, utility, and transportation sectors weren’t fully detailed above, but attacks there though fewer in number can be devastating. A Q3 2025 case: a ransomware attack on an airport software Collins Aerospace’s check in system disrupted multiple major airports’ operations with hundreds of flights delayed. We increasingly see ransomware groups flirting with critical infrastructure, knowing it causes panic and news coverage, even if their payday isn’t assured.

Having looked at industries, next we consider the regional breakdown how ransomware trends vary across geographies and what geopolitical factors are in play.

Regional Breakdown: Ransomware Around the World

Ransomware is a global threat, but the intensity and nature of attacks can vary by region due to differences in wealth, cyber readiness, and even geopolitics. Here’s a 2025 regional outlook:

North America U.S. & Canada: Epicenter of Targeting and Costs

• The United States remains the single most targeted country for ransomware. Approximately 47% of global ransomware attacks in 2023 hit the U.S. North America US+Canada saw 3,259 incidents in 2024 more than the next three regions combined, according to one report. This is largely because North America has a high concentration of wealthy organizations and critical industries that make enticing targets.
• Costs in NA are highest: As noted, the average total cost of a breach in the U.S. hit $10.22M, partly because organizations hold more data and face costly lawsuits/regulations after breaches. Ransom demands in the U.S. also tend to be higher since attackers assume U.S. companies have cyber insurance or deep pockets.
• Notable incidents: North America has had a string of headline ransomware events: e.g., Colonial Pipeline fuel distribution, 2021, JBS Foods meat processing, 2021, LAUSD Los Angeles schools, 2022, NCR Aloha point of sale outage hitting restaurants, 2023, and in 2024–25 attacks on city governments Oakland, Dallas, Toronto city was hit by LockBit in 2023, etc.. One example from 2024: City of North Miami Beach was hit and, due to Florida’s anti payment law, could not pay a ransom even if they wanted to. The result was a multi week disruption of city services. Police had to switch to paper reports, utilities billing was delayed, etc., demonstrating how policy of non-payment shifts the problem to being one of robust recovery.
• Trends: Ransomware actors still view the U.S. as the biggest jackpot especially for whale targets. But they have also complained in underground forums about U.S. targets increasingly refusing to pay, sometimes due to FBI advice or backups. This has led some groups to try more Canada or mid-sized U.S. businesses rather than large Fortune 100s. Also, U.S. law enforcement has grown more aggressive the DoJ’s seizures of ransom payments like clawing back a portion of the Colonial Pipeline Bitcoin and international operations like the LockBit affiliate arrests have a regional focus on NA based incidents.

Europe: Rising Attacks, Stronger Regulations

• Europe experienced a significant uptick in ransomware in 2024–25. Check Point noted Europe saw a 22% YoY increase in weekly attacks in Q2 2025 the highest jump among regions. In raw numbers, Group IB data showed Europe had 1,136 ransomware incidents in 2024 second only to North America. The U.K. particularly is a hotbed, accounting for 25% of European incidents likely due to London’s financial sector and a large number of organizations.
• GDPR and resilience: European companies are subject to the GDPR regulation, which imposes heavy fines for data breaches. This has indirectly improved breach response companies invest in better encryption and backups to avoid data loss. Indeed, European organizations report higher data recovery success rates one stat: Germany recovered data in 79% of ransomware cases vs the global average 70% possibly because GDPR forced them to plan for worst case scenarios. Also, some European governments, France, etc. have strong stances against paying ransoms, similar to the U.S.
• Regional differences: Within Europe, there’s variance. Western/Northern Europe UK, Germany, Nordics generally have better security posture than Southern/Eastern Europe. For instance, in 2025, reports indicated that 30-35% of ransomware attacks in France, Italy, Spain exploited known vulnerabilities implying patch delays, whereas countries like Germany saw more social engineering based attacks implying tech was patched but humans were targeted. East European countries are also targeted, but interestingly Russian speaking countries often are avoided by Russian ransomware gangs. Many malware strains won’t run if they detect Russian/Belarusian language packs, a common tactic to avoid trouble at home.
• Notable incidents in Europe: The UK saw major incidents like the Capita breach 2023 while not pure ransomware, data was stolen and ransomed, affecting multiple govt agencies. The NHS healthcare has been repeatedly hit. The 2017 WannaCry was a wake up call, but even in 2022/23 there were NHS supplier ransomware incidents. In 2025, the previously mentioned Lynx group breach of the UK MoD contractor was especially concerning for national security. Also, a ransomware attack on the UK Electoral Commission disclosed 2023 exposed voter data of 40 million people. Meanwhile, Italy’s ASL healthcare systems and Spain’s SEPE unemployment agency were notable targets in recent years. Europe shows a mix of criminal and state related ransomware activity e.g., Russian actors seeking to embarrass or destabilize European entities as part of the Ukraine conflict fallout.

Asia Pacific APAC: Growing Target, Lower Payments

• Asia Pacific accounts for roughly 10–15% of global ransomware attacks. Japan, Australia, and India are among the most targeted in the region. In 2024, 467 incidents were recorded in APAC per Group IB, which is smaller compared to NA/EU but still significant.
• Characteristics: APAC companies generally see lower ransom demands and payments compared to U.S./Europe. One reason is that cyber insurance is less prevalent in many APAC countries, and attackers calibrate demands to what they think locals can pay. For example, Japan has been targeted for its manufacturing companies, but culturally and legally Japanese firms are very averse to paying ransoms, so actors might not waste time with protracted negotiation. Some data suggests the average ransom in APAC was around $1.4M, lower than global average.
• Notable APAC events: In 2023, several Japanese tech manufacturers like Nikon, Yamaha were hit by ransomware, likely by LockBit, often with data leaks. Australia had a rash of incidents, including attacks on hospitals and a defense communications provider ForceNet in late 2022. India saw its national medical institute AIIMS hit by ransomware in 2022, crippling it for weeks. Japanese organizations in particular have been stressed by ransomware. A 2025 stat showed Japan accounted for about 11–14% of global attacks, punching above its weight, probably because of its wealth and extensive supply chain links. Southeast Asia has also had big breaches e.g., Indonesia’s national gas company Pertamina leaked data after a 2023 attack. China is an interesting case: being a tightly controlled internet environment, fewer Western ransomware groups target China fear of retaliation, though domestic ransomware exists.
• Government stance: Many APAC governments strongly discourage paying ransoms. Australia considered making it illegal for companies to pay. There’s also increasing regional cooperation to fight cybercrime, for instance, Interpol’s operations in ASEAN have led to multiple ransomware gang arrests. This could make APAC a tougher place for gangs to operate in the future, potentially pushing them elsewhere.

Latin America: Emerging Hotspot

• Latin America saw perhaps the sharpest increase in ransomware activity of any region. As mentioned, Q1 2025 saw a 108% YoY increase in weekly attacks in LatAm, the steepest globally. This suggests that as North America/Europe hardened, gangs refocused on Latin American orgs that might be softer targets.
• Countries like Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Chile have all reported surges. For example, Brazil’s public sector entities like court systems, state banks have been hit frequently. In 2024, a Brazilian healthcare lab had millions of records leaked by ransomware. Mexico had its national oil company Pemex attacked back in 2019 demand was $5M. Chile saw a major government insecurity: in 2023 the whole government network was ordered offline due to a ransomware threat.
• The data suggests Latin American organizations are indeed being increasingly targeted e.g., Check Point’s mid 2025 report said LatAm orgs face 39% more weekly attacks than the global average. Attackers might demand lower ransoms knowing budgets are smaller, but even a $500k demand can be very challenging for a mid sized company there. The capability of organizations to respond is also varied, a few large banks in LatAm are well defended, but many mid tier companies have minimal security.
• There’s also possibly less reporting transparency, so the true numbers might be higher.

Middle East & Africa MEA: Steady Targeting, Infrastructure in Crosshairs

• MEA accounted for a smaller share of recorded ransomware incidents 184 in 2024 per one dataset, but that may be underreported. South Africa, UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Nigeria have seen notable attacks. South Africa had its ports authority hit by ransomware in 2021 disrupting shipping. The UAE’s oil company ADNOC reportedly faced an attempt in 2022. Several state owned enterprises in the Middle East have been targeted by Iranian or Russian actors mixing espionage and ransom.
• A stat from Group IB indicated MEA saw around 184 incidents and tended to hit professional services, government, and manufacturing in that region. One peculiarity: some ransomware groups avoid certain Middle Eastern countries likely for political alignment reasons, while others, like the Israeli hospital attacks in 2021, show no one’s off limits.
• Africa has emerging cybercrime talent and unfortunately that means some local gangs and many victims. The Interpol operation Serengeti 2.0 Aug 2025 arrested over 1,200 cybercriminals across 18 African countries, many involved in financial scams but some in ransomware too. African organizations have been hit with big demands e.g., a university in Namibia in 2022 got a $1M ransom note. The capacity to respond in many African orgs is low, making them likely to just lose data if attacked and not pay due to lack of funds.

Geopolitical factors: The war in Ukraine blurred lines between state cyber operations and criminal ransomware. Russian patriotic hacker groups like KillNet, NoName057 launched ransomware or pseudo ransomware attacks against Western targets mostly to disrupt rather than for money. Ukraine itself became the 5th most targeted country globally in 2022–2023 though many attacks there were destructive wipers masquerading as ransomware as seen in the Russia Ukraine conflict. NATO countries saw an uptick in ransomware that looked politically motivated, such as attacks timed around political events e.g., a German oil supply firm was hit in 2022 amidst energy tensions. In 2025, one could argue some attacks on defense contractors like the UK Dodd Group hack by Lynx were more about intelligence gathering than extortion, but the use of ransomware tools complicates attribution.

Summary: Ransomware is everywhere, but North America and Europe are at the epicenter in terms of volume and consequences. Attackers are, however, shifting attention to regions like Latin America and Asia where they perceive easier wins. Each region’s legal and cultural context e.g., legality of paying ransom, prevalence of cyber insurance, law enforcement strength influences how attacks play out. For instance, an American company might call the FBI and refuse to pay, whereas a company in another region might quietly pay to make it go away. The net effect globally is that ransomware groups operate without strict borders. A Russian hacker may hit a South African company one week and a Canadian one the next. International cooperation in law enforcement is improving e.g., the FBI, Europol, Interpol working together on multi country busts, but as long as safe havens exist notably Russia for Russian nationals, the threat persists globally.

Next, let’s recount a few major ransomware incidents of 2025 to illustrate how these stats manifest in real world attacks and what lessons they carried.

Major Ransomware Incidents of 2025

While statistics give us the big picture, individual breach stories highlight the impact and often drive improvements. Here are a few of the most significant ransomware incidents or campaigns that occurred or came to light in 2025:

1. Jaguar Land Rover September 2025: Most Expensive Cyberattack in UK History In Sept 2025, luxury automaker Jaguar Land Rover JLR suffered a massive ransomware attack that disrupted operations across multiple manufacturing plants in the UK. The attack, claimed by a group calling itself Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters, forced production line stoppages and impacted JLR’s IT systems company wide. It was estimated to cost £1.9 billion in losses, due to halted production and recovery costs. If that figure is accurate, it makes it the costliest cyber incident in UK to date. Notably, the attackers’ identity was not fully confirmed by authorities. The name implies maybe a mix of tactics from the Lapsus$ group which previously did data extortion, and Scattered Spider, but the impact showed how devastating ransomware can be to manufacturing. Lesson: Even companies that invest heavily in security an automaker of this size certainly has significant IT security can fall if attackers get in and the cost can dwarf the ransom demand. It’s unclear if any ransom was paid, likely not, as law enforcement was involved and it was treated as a national security issue given the economic impact.

2. Lynx Breach of Dodd Group UK MoD Contractor October 2025: Espionage meets Ransomware A Russian cybercrime gang called Lynx with suspected Kremlin ties infiltrated Dodd Group, a contractor for the UK Ministry of Defence. They deployed ransomware to mask extensive data theft: around 4TB of sensitive files were stolen, including security procedures and base layouts for RAF and Royal Navy installations, csis. The attackers then leaked hundreds of those documents online when a ransom wasn’t paid, causing a potential security nightmare as even names of security personnel were exposed. The UK MOD had to scramble to assess damage and issue guidance to bases. Lesson: This incident showed how ransomware is used by state aligned actors as part of hybrid warfare. The money may be secondary to the espionage. It also highlighted a supply chain risk: attackers didn’t hack the Ministry directly but a less protected contractor. The use of ransomware encryption was mainly to lock the contractor’s systems and give the hackers leverage/time to exfiltrate data.

3. Kido Daycare Breach September 2025: Ransomware Exposes Children’s Data In London, a network of nurseries Kido International was breached by a new gang calling itself Radiant. They exfiltrated and encrypted data including photographs and personal info of over 8,000 children from 18 nursery schools. The initial access was reportedly via a phishing email that allowed RDP access. The hackers demanded ransom amount undisclosed, likely in the low millions. Public backlash was huge, leaking kids’ photos crosses a line even for criminals. Under pressure, the Radiant group claimed to delete the data without payment after media exposure perhaps they got cold feet given the outrage. Lesson: Some attacks target vulnerable parts of society schools, and while criminals rationalize targeting companies for money, going after a childcare provider created PR blowback. It also underscores how any organization, even a small preschool chain can be swept up in this. From a data protection view, regulators no doubt took interest, even if the gang said they deleted data, those families will live with fear of misuse.

4. Collins Aerospace Airport Outage September 2025: Flights Grounded by Ransomware A ransomware attack hit the vMUSE airport check in system operated by Collins Aerospace a contractor in Sept 2025. This system is used in multiple airports, the ransomware encrypted backend servers, causing check in and boarding systems to go down at Heathrow London, Brussels, and Berlin airports simultaneously. Airlines had to switch to manual check ins, leading to huge lines and hundreds of flight delays. European aviation authorities did not publicly attribute it to a known group, but the assumption is a criminal gang targeted the vendor to extort them, with collateral damage to major transport hubs. Lesson: Ransomware on critical logistic infrastructure can have far reaching consequences beyond one company here one attack impacted three international airports and thousands of passengers. It was a wake up call for the aviation industry to segment and secure operational networks. Also, it showed the risk of single points of failure . One IT service provider serving many clients can be an attractive target to cause widescale impact similar to Kaseya VSA in 2021 affecting hundreds of MSP clients.

5. Medusa vs. BBC Insider Bribery Attempt 2025: Inside Job Thwarted Although not resulting in an actual breach, a notable incident was reported where the Medusa ransomware group directly approached an employee of a BBC subsidiary in Q3 2025. They offered the insider a 15% cut of any ransom if he would deploy their ransomware on his company’s network via his work PC. The employee fortunately reported this to authorities instead. This incident became public and showed the novel tactic of recruiting insiders. Medusa is a known criminal group, this was one of the first documented cases of a ransomware crew attempting to recruit in a major Western company. Lesson: Trust barriers have shifted now companies have to worry about their own staff being recruited by cybercriminals. It also indicated how desperate or creative groups became as external defenses improved, if you can’t phish in, maybe someone will let you in through the front door. This is a major concern for CISOs technical controls mean little if an IT admin intentionally lets the fox into the henhouse.

6. Bonus ALPHV/BlackCat Exit Scam Early 2024: When Ransomware Gangs Rob Their Own This technically happened in early 2024 but its ripple effects were felt into 2025. The infamous ALPHV aka BlackCat ransomware gang faked a shutdown claiming law enforcement seizure only to actually abscond with their affiliates’ escrowed ransom funds an exit scam. They stole possibly tens of millions from their own affiliate hackers. This caused chaos in the underground: trust in Ransomware as a Service took a huge hit. Many affiliates left big RaaS programs like LockBit or ALPHV and either went solo the lone wolves or joined smaller upstarts. This fragmentation likely contributed to the rise of groups like Qilin and the increase in independent actors 15% market share as noted. Lesson: There’s no honor among thieves, even criminals defraud each other. But from the defender angle, sowing distrust in the criminal ecosystem can be a powerful tool some speculate law enforcement may have had a hand in fueling those fears. This incident significantly altered the threat landscape we see in 2025, with more unpredictable, smaller groups in play.

Each of these incidents reinforces aspects of the statistics we discussed: enormous financial impact JLR, data theft blending with ransom Lynx/Dodd, the human element Kido, Medusa/BBC, and the interconnected fallout airports.

One can see how operational disruption has become perhaps the main weapon of ransomware whether it’s halting car production or grounding flights. Even as ransom payments dwindle, attackers find value in the chaos itself either to extort indirectly or to serve a political goal.

Now, let’s look ahead: what new or evolving trends are emerging in the ransomware space, and what do experts expect next?

Emerging Trends in Ransomware 2025 and Beyond

Ransomware is continuously evolving. Based on 2024–2025 developments, several emerging trends are shaping the future of this threat:

1. Data Only Extortion & Multi Extortion: We’ve touched on this, but it’s accelerating. Many threat actors are moving to extort without encrypting at all stealing data and threatening leaks pure data ransom. In 2025, Coveware noted that in data exfiltration only cases, only 19% of victims paid victims are more willing to gamble that a leak won’t be too damaging or that the criminals won’t follow through. In response, attackers are layering multiple extortion methods: they might encrypt data, steal data, and even harass victims’ customers or employees e.g., calling them or DDoSing their website to pile on pressure. This is often called triple extortion. There’s also a trend of re extortion hitting the same victim again if they paid, or selling the data to other criminals to extort like data of customers for phishing. The statistics showing 80% of those who paid get hit again underscores this. We expect data privacy issues to dominate ransomware discussions because even if you can restore your systems, you can’t restore the confidentiality of stolen data. Organizations will need to invest more in encryption of data at rest and in data loss prevention, not just backup.

2. RaaS Decentralization and Affiliate Chaos: The big RaaS cartels are fractured. LockBit is still active but less dominant, Conti is gone, BlackCat ALPHV self sabotaged, others like REvil vanished after arrests. Rising stars like Qilin, Akira, RansomHub, Fog have gained share, but none have achieved the monopoly of prior gangs. A Coveware stat from Q3 2025 shows Akira at 34% of cases, Qilin 10%, then a long tail including Lone Wolf at 6%. This suggests that no single strain now accounts for more than a third of attacks, a big change from when LockBit or Conti each had 30%+ consistently. What this means: the ransomware scene is more volatile. New variants pop up, old ones rebrand. One trend to watch is open source ransomware. Some source code like Babuk’s leaked online, so any low skilled criminal can build off it. We might see more one off or copycat groups making attribution hard. However, the affiliate model still exists, groups like Royal, BlackBasta operate semi privately with select affiliates. We may also see consolidation in a different way: some affiliates could team up to form their own mini cartels as possibly happened with Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters. For defenders, this means indicators of compromise are all over the place you can’t just profile one or two actor TTPs, you must be ready for a zoo of variants.

3. Cloud Ransomware Attackers target the cloud infrastructure: With more businesses moving data to cloud services, attackers are following. The Codefinger S3 attacks discussed are a prime example of ransomware not by malware but by abusing cloud management. Another scenario: attackers compromise Azure or Google Cloud accounts and tamper with or delete data backups stored there, or spin up expensive resources as secondary extortion cryptojacking ransom where they run crypto miners on your cloud and rack up a huge bill, then demand money to stop. Cloud infrastructure is also a target for Denial of service extortion: e.g., threatening to delete entire cloud environments via admin console if not paid. One emerging tactic is going after SaaS data e.g., ransomware groups have tried to breach cloud file storage like SharePoint/OneDrive or collaboration tools to both steal and encrypt files. A Trend Micro analysis in 2025 broke down S3 attack paths and defenses, highlighting this is a known issue. As organizations improve endpoint security, expect more incidents where the attack never touches the endpoint it’s cloud to cloud. This challenges traditional detection, network defenders need to monitor cloud API logs and behaviors for signs of mass encryption or unusual data lifecycle changes.

4. AI in Both Offense and Defense: Attackers are leveraging AI primarily to enhance social engineering and automation. We’ve seen how deepfakes enabled a huge fraud Arup case. It’s plausible ransomware negotiators might face deepfake voices of their CEO urging them to pay, or employees might get AI generated phone calls that sound exactly like IT support. On the defensive side, companies are deploying AI for anomaly detection which partially contributed to that drop in global breach cost faster detection. IBM’s 2025 report explicitly calls out that organizations using security AI and automation saw on average $1.76M lower breach costs than those that don’t. So it’s an arms race: AI generated phishing vs AI filtering phishing. Another aspect is AI written malware so far, ransomware code is still largely human made, but AI could help optimize malware packing, generate polymorphic code to evade AV, or find vulnerabilities faster. Already, tools like ChatGPT with some coaxing can produce working ransomware code samples OpenAI tries to prevent this, but determined actors find ways. We might see unique ransomware strains created with AI that have novel evasion techniques. On defense, there’s interest in AI that can automatically isolate a suspected ransomware outbreak in progress some EDRs do attempt auto quarantine based on behavioral signs of encryption. AI driven incident response could drastically cut down encryption time window if successful.

5. Focus on Big Game and Critical Infrastructure: Paradoxically, even as many attacks scatter to smaller victims, some groups double down on trying to snag whales. The numbers about average payment going up 500% reflect that if a Fortune 50 is compromised, the payout can be enormous, the $75M example. We expect a continued split: commodity ransomware hitting SMBs for quick wins, and a few elite crews chasing government agencies, large enterprises, or critical infrastructure with custom tailored intrusions. The latter might involve APT like operations: multi month network intrusion, carefully mapped and then ransomware deployed as the coup de grace. Some ransomware groups may effectively become indistinguishable from nation state actors in how they operate. For instance, Black Basta and Lockbit have been known to maintain persistence and do extensive reconnaissance. The worry is critical infrastructure e.g., energy grids or pipelines could be targeted by ransomware crews either purely for profit they think the org will pay big to resume service or as false flag for state actors cause chaos and make it look like crime. The trends already show more incidents in manufacturing, oil & gas, and utilities Industrial Cyber reported half of 2025 attacks hitting critical sectors. So governments are increasingly treating major ransomware as national security events, not just criminal matters.

6. Extended Recovery & Insurance Shifts: Another emerging aspect is how organizations handle recovery. With cyber insurance not reliably covering ransoms, companies are investing in more resilient architectures, immutable backups, isolated recovery environments, etc. A trend is practicing ransomware drills akin to disaster recovery drills. Some stats show improvement: in 2025, 97% of organizations were able to recover their encrypted data eventually, which is encouraging. Also, interestingly, the average recovery costs excluding ransom seem to be dropping. One stat said average recovery cost not counting ransom fell from $3.1M in 2024 to $1.7M in 2025 globally. This could indicate that companies are getting better at recovery, maybe through better backups, segmentation limiting blast radius, etc., or that more smaller incidents cheaper to fix are happening. If true, that’s a promising trend. Cyber insurers, meanwhile, are pushing insureds hard to improve controls some won’t cover you if you don’t have MFA everywhere, for instance. While not a technical trend, the insurance evolution means in future, companies who don’t harden might simply be uninsurable or extremely costly to insure. That will force better baseline practices, which could reduce successful attacks.

7. Legal and Regulatory Responses: Governments are not sitting idle. We see more law enforcement takedowns like the coordinated hit on the QakBot botnet in Aug 2023 which was used by many ransomware groups. New laws are being proposed: some want to ban paying ransoms. This debate might deter attackers if universally enforced, but could also bankrupt victims who can’t recover. The EU’s NIS2 directive and U.S.’s critical infrastructure reporting law are requiring that ransomware incidents be reported within 24 72 hours to authorities, which will improve collective response. There’s also talk of treating ransomware groups as terrorists to use tougher financial sanctions. If such policies become more common, it might crimp the ransom economy by making it outright illegal for companies to transfer funds to these groups. However, enforcement is tricky globally.

To sum up, ransomware is at a crossroads. The past year’s statistics hint that the easy money days might be ending, and threat actors will evolve into either more specialized, high skill operations fewer but more potent attacks or spray attacks augmented by automation lots of noise to snare easy victims. It’s likely we’ll see a bit of both.

Next, let’s interpret these statistics and trends into strategic insights. What do they mean for organizations in practical terms?

What These Statistics Mean: Analysis and Implications

The numbers and trends we’ve discussed aren’t just trivia they have real implications for how organizations should strategize their cybersecurity and risk management. Here are the key takeaways and interpretations from the 2025 ransomware stats:

• Ransomware is now more a crisis management problem than a purely technical one. The fact that only 1 in 4 victims are paying ransoms means the majority of organizations are essentially treating ransomware incidents as IT disasters to recover from, not as transactions. This is a positive shift denying criminals revenue but it means every organization must be prepared to recover from ransomware without outside help. This puts emphasis on resilience: having robust, tested backups offline or immutable, incident response plans that assume worst case all systems encrypted, no decryption key coming. The stat that 97% can recover data from backups is heartening it shows investments in backup strategies are paying off. If you’re in the 3% without that ability, you’re the low hanging fruit for extortion.
• Diminishing returns for attackers = more desperation tactics. The volume vs. value paradox attackers launching 11,000 attacks/day for fewer payoffs suggests the ROI of each attack is dropping. To compensate, threat actors are doing two things: hitting more targets which means even nobody companies are at risk now, not just big names and using more aggressive tactics per target like double extortion, public shaming, harassing emails to clients, etc.. So, mid size firms that thought they were under the radar are getting caught in the wide net, and any organization hit might face not just encryption but also data leak threats and PR nightmares. The implication: Every organization, small or large, public or private, should have at least basic ransomware defense and response plans. It’s not just Fortune 500s municipalities, non profits, small manufacturers, etc., are all in the fire. Also, companies need to plan for the scenario of a leak e.g., having a plan to communicate with customers if their data gets posted on a leak site.
• Industrial and life critical sectors need elevated protections. Manufacturing being 26% of attacks and healthcare having highest breach costs show adversaries gravitate to where they can inflict maximum pain and thus potentially earn money. For those sectors, traditional IT security might not be enough, they need to invest in OT security, network segmentation so an infected office PC can’t take down a factory or ICU, and perhaps analog fail safes. E.g., a hospital might ensure it can revert to paper processes for a week, a factory might keep spare PLC controllers offline to swap in if the network gets ransomed. Regulators are starting to enforce this: the U.S. FDA now requires cyber assurances for medical devices, and the EU’s NIS2 covers hospitals and energy grids. The stats justify these moves lives and economies are literally at stake.
• Cyber insurance is no silver bullet and might not save you at all. With 42% of insured orgs saying coverage fell short and many insurers not covering the ransom itself, companies cannot bank on insurance to bail them out. Plus, with claim frequencies dropping as in 2025 but severity up, insurers are getting stingier. This means risk managers should not simply transfer risk they must mitigate it. Insurers now often demand evidence of MFA, EDR, offline backups, etc. as a condition. If you can’t get insurance or the deductible is huge, investing that money in better security controls probably has a better payoff. The stats showing lower breach costs with faster detection support investing in detection/response capabilities over just insuring.
• Paying ransom is increasingly pointless and dangerous. The data about 46% of payers not recovering data fully and 80% of payers getting hit again is perhaps the strongest argument to boards and CEOs: even if you pay, odds are you won’t be back to normal, and you might invite more attacks. This demolishes the old thinking we’ll just pay and move on. In 2025, that’s a losing strategy. Attackers may not provide a working decryptor or it’s so slow it’s useless, they might leak your data anyway, or sell your info to another gang. So organizations should shift focus from ransom payment contingencies like getting cryptocurrency ready to resilience. Many have updated their crisis management playbooks to say payment is last resort, if at all. Interestingly, the one scenario where payment still often happens is to prevent data leaks e.g., pay smaller hush money to not publish stolen data. But even that is proving unreliable. So the safer assumption is: assume any stolen data will be leaked eventually, and plan accordingly encrypt sensitive data at rest to limit its exposure, etc.. If one does decide to pay, it should be with eyes open that it might only slightly improve the situation and could worsen it you become known as a payer.
• Time to detection and response is critical. We saw breach costs drop globally because companies detected incidents faster IBM report. Ransomware typically has a period of intrusion reconnaissance and privilege escalation before detonation. If you can catch attackers in that window, the pre encryption phase, often 1-3 weeks long on average, you can stop it from ever becoming a full blown ransomware event. The Coveware data showing lateral movement in 73% of cases implies that attackers are moving around internally which is a chance to spot them via anomalous admin tool usage, unusual login times, etc.. Also, 43% of cases had discovery actions mapping out the network another opportunity for detection. The trends around hybrid intrusion techniques phishing + remote access combined mean security teams should look for subtle signs like a user VPN ing in from an unusual location or a new device enabling MFA by social engineering the helpdesk. Essentially, early detection can turn a potential $5M incident into a minor IT cleanup. Statistics suggest that organizations using extended detection & response XDR tools and having an IR team could cut response times down significantly, thereby limiting damage.
• Focus on Identity and Access Management: Many of these attacks exploited credentials. Attackers are logging in, not hacking in as one report put it. With 30% of breaches starting with valid account abuse, strengthening identity controls is paramount. This means universal MFA including on internal admin actions, not just remote logins, adopting zero trust principles don’t trust even internal traffic by default, monitoring for credential dumps, using password managers and training staff not to reuse passwords. Also, things like conditional access blocking logins from strange geographies could thwart some attacks. The fact that 16 billion passwords were exposed online in one 2025 incident is sobering assume your employees’ passwords will leak, so have layers MFA, least privilege so a leaked password alone can’t wreck you.
• The human element needs new training paradigms: Phishing is down as initial vector percentage wise, but that’s partly because everything else caught up. Social engineering remains part of many attacks. However, classic awareness training don’t click bad links, etc. is not enough when facing AI crafted emails or deepfake calls. Organizations should update their verification procedures e.g., a verbal wire transfer request might require a known code word or callback to a known number since voice can be faked. Security culture needs to evolve to trust but verify every unusual request, even if it appears to come from the CEO or IT department. The Arup case demonstrates even savvy people can be duped by novel tactics. One stat 1 in 54 GenAI prompts had sensitive data also shows employees are inadvertently creating leaks, so training must include the safe use of AI e.g., don’t paste source code or customer data into ChatGPT. Essentially, the definition of a phishing attempt now extends to phone, video, chats, etc., and people need to be alert in all those channels.
• Backups and beyond: securing the recovery: With 97% recovery possible from backups, backups truly are the cornerstone of ransomware defense. But attackers know this and hence target backups either by deleting them or encrypting them too. Stats about backup restore rates dropping to 54% the lowest in 6 years imply that attackers are succeeding in undermining backups in many cases perhaps by attacking online backup solutions or domain wide credentials that have backup access. The implication: backups must be offline or immutable write once so attackers can’t easily tamper. Also, having multiple backup routes local, offsite, cloud helps. And crucially, test those backups! Many companies had backups but discovered too late they weren’t complete or timely. Also consider backing up cloud SaaS data which many forget e.g., having a third party backup for O365 email or Salesforce data, which ransomware could potentially wipe or attackers could delete. The stat that 47% of organizations used multiple recovery methods backups + some ransom shows that sometimes backups alone weren’t enough, likely because data theft was in play. So organizations should pair backups for availability with data encryption for confidentiality. If stolen data is encrypted or tokenized, it’s less useful for extortion.
• Law enforcement can be an ally but have a plan regardless: IBM found that if law enforcement is involved, 63% of those incidents ended with no ransom paid. Many agencies will assist quietly, providing negotiation advice or maybe decryptors if available. However, in the heat of an incident you can’t count on a magic fix reaching out is wise, but your internal plan should assume you’re on your own for the critical first hours. Still, building relationships with agencies like the FBI or local cyber task forces ahead of time can pay dividends. There’s also an information sharing benefit: by reporting, you help the whole community track the threat. The trend is more openness in sharing indicators of compromise from victims some anonymize and share via industry ISACs. This collective defense approach is growing, which is encouraging.

In essence, these statistics collectively mean ransomware is increasingly a manageable risk, not an apocalyptic inevitability, IF you prepare properly. The dramatic drop in payment rates suggests that with solid backups, incident response and a willingness to absorb some pain, companies can survive ransomware hits without funding criminals. That is a huge positive shift compared to a few years ago. However, the flip side is attackers are not giving up, they’re innovating and casting a wider net, which means the threat remains acute.

For a CISO or security team, the data driven approach would be: invest in the areas that statistics show pay off backup and recovery, rapid detection, least privilege, patching critical external systems and be skeptical of areas that don’t have clear impact e.g., buying ransomware decryptor services is moot if you never plan to pay. Use the stats to justify budget: e.g., our industry’s average downtime is 12 days, but if we implement network segmentation and incident response drills, we aim to cut that in half, saving X million according to downtime cost stats.

Finally, let’s translate these insights into concrete best practices.

Best Practices for Ransomware Defense in 2025

Given the evolving landscape depicted by these statistics, here are the recommended best practices and steps organizations should take or continue to protect against ransomware in 2025:

1. Implement 3 2 1 Backups with Offline Copies: Ensure you have at least 3 copies of critical data, on 2 different media types, with 1 kept offline or immutable in cloud. Regularly test restoring from backups. Use immutable storage for backups when possible cloud providers offer write once storage options. The goal is that even if attackers get domain admin, they cannot erase your last resort backup. Also keep a generation of backups off site and not continuously connected. Since 97% of those with good backups recovered data, this is your lifeline. Treat backups like gold: secure them with separate credentials, multi factor auth, and network isolation.

2. Strengthen Identity and Access Management Zero Trust: With credential abuse in 30% of incidents, multi factor authentication MFA is a must for all remote access, admin accounts, and especially VPN/RDP connections. Enforce least privilege users should not have more access than necessary, and admin accounts should be tightly controlled use just in time admin privileges if possible. Disable or tightly monitor RDP and other remote protocols, if RDP is needed internally, restrict it by network rules. Implement password policies that mitigate credential stuffing: encourage a password manager and unique passwords, monitor for your company’s credentials in breach dumps. Consider phasing out passwords entirely for critical access in favor of passwordless auth like FIDO2 tokens. Adopt a Zero Trust Network Architecture assume an internal breach will happen and segment networks so that a compromised account in one segment e.g., an employee PC VLAN can’t directly reach crown jewels like servers with sensitive data without going through additional security checks.

3. Patch Critical Vulnerabilities Especially on Edge Devices: As 32% of attacks start via vulnerabilities, maintain a strong vulnerability management program. Prioritize patching externally facing systems: VPN appliances, firewalls apply firmware updates, web servers, and software like email gateways or file sharing apps. Use virtual patching or workarounds if a patch isn’t available. Subscribe to threat intelligence feeds for any signs of ransomware groups exploiting specific CVEs e.g., the Ivanti or Fortinet CVEs used in 2024. If you have appliances that can’t be patched quickly, at least ensure they are not accessible to the whole internet, put them behind a VPN or restrict IP ranges. Also patch internal high value targets domain controllers, etc. since if an attacker gets in, they’ll go after unpatched internal systems to elevate privileges.

4. Enhance Detection and Response Capabilities: Given the importance of catching attackers pre encryption, deploy Endpoint Detection & Response EDR on all servers and endpoints. Use behavior based alerting e.g., alert on mass file encryption activity, or on tools like Mimikatz usage which often precedes ransomware deployment. Configure logging and monitoring of key things: PowerShell logs, Windows Event logs for suspicious logon patterns, and network traffic for large data exfiltration. Invest in a Security Operations Center SOC or managed detection service that can monitor 24/7. Since dwell times can be as short as <2 weeks, you need continuous monitoring to spot night/weekend intrusions. Run regular threat hunting for known indicators of ransomware presence for example, if you find Cobalt Strike beacons or network scans, that could indicate a ransomware affiliate staging. Also, test your IR plan with ransomware tabletop exercises simulate an attack and ensure your team knows how to isolate affected machines quickly, how to communicate, etc. The faster you respond ideally within minutes of detection, the more you limit damage.

5. Segment and Protect Critical Assets: Don’t flat network your entire IT environment. Use network segmentation to separate critical servers like Active Directory, file servers, backups, OT networks from user workstations. Implement strict firewall rules between segments e.g., accounting PCs don’t need to talk to manufacturing control systems. Use application allowlisting on servers if possible so only approved applications run. Ransomware can traverse networks quickly, one attack every 19 seconds globally means automated propagation is common, so having choke points can stop it. Particularly, isolate backup networks and management networks. Also consider endpoint hardening: disable unneeded services, use controlled folder access or similar anti ransomware features on Windows 10/11 that block untrusted processes from modifying files. Remove or turn off old protocols SMBv1, LLMNR, etc. that ransomware often uses for lateral movement.

6. Prepare an Incident Response Plan and Don’t Neglect Communication: Have a detailed IR plan for ransomware: steps to isolate infected systems e.g., network kill switch procedures, contact info for law enforcement and cyber insurer, decision trees for whether to consider payment, etc. Form a ransom crisis team including IT, legal, communications, and executive leadership. Draft templates for internal and external communications you may need to quickly notify customers if data is stolen, per laws. Identify ahead of time an external incident response firm and legal counsel you’d call many companies lose precious hours figuring this out during the incident. Since many attacks occur around holidays or off hours, ensure your plan covers who is on call and how to reach key people 24/7. Test the plan with drills. A good plan can cut downtime significantly because everyone knows their role.

7. Harden Email and Train Users Next Gen Awareness: Since phishing is 18% of initial vectors and often the start of credential theft, invest in advanced email security filtering for phishing, sandboxing attachments, blocking known bad URLs. Implement DMARC to prevent spoofed emails from your domain and encourage partners to do same. Continue user training, but modernize it: include scenarios about deepfake calls, suspicious messages on chat platforms e.g., an unexpected WhatsApp from CEO. Teach users to verify requests out of band. Consider phishing drill exercises to keep employees alert, but also incorporate new forms like simulated phone scams. Encourage a culture where employees won’t be punished for reporting mistakes. You want them to quickly raise hand if they clicked something rather than hide it. Additionally, given the rise of insider bribery, educate staff that if they are approached by someone offering money for access, it’s a criminal act and encourage them to report it immediately, perhaps even reward them for reporting, as that’s as important as reporting phishing.

8. Secure and Monitor Cloud Environments: Treat cloud like an extension of your enterprise network. Use cloud provider tools to set up alerting on unusual activities e.g., in AWS, alert if large S3 lifecycle policy changes or if an IAM key downloads massive data from S3 unexpectedly, which could be cloud ransomware in action. Implement least privilege in cloud IAM roles, do not hardcode credentials in code since Codefinger attacks often start with leaked keys from GitHub. Use encryption and versioning in cloud storage encryption won’t stop ransomware but ensures stolen data can’t be read if the keys are separate. Versioning can help recover overwritten objects unless attacker also deletes versions. Regularly backup cloud data to alternate storage e.g., back up SaaS data to a different cloud or on prem. In short, apply the same backup, detection, and identity rigor to cloud as on prem.

9. Stay Informed and Share Intelligence: Subscribe to threat intel feeds about ransomware from ISACs or certs. If you see a peer organization get hit, assume the same technique may come for you proactively check your exposure to whatever got them e.g., if it was a Citrix vulnerability, have we patched ours?. Sharing info anonymously if needed about attacks with industry groups can help everyone. Government agencies like CISA US or NCSC UK often publish indicators of compromise for major ransomware, integrate those into your detection tools. Build relationships with local FBI or law enforcement cyber units before an incident, so if you need help, you know who to call and they know you.

10. Evaluate Your Cyber Insurance and Policy on Ransom: Re-examine your stance on paying ransoms. Most experts and governments advise against paying and stats support that low success rate, funds crime. Establish ahead of time your organization’s policy some boards formally resolve not to pay, unless perhaps life is at risk. If you do think you might pay in some extreme scenario, at least plan how to do so legally, ensuring not paying sanctioned entities, etc.. But overall, focus on making it so you don’t need to pay, that means strong backups and having data segmented such that even if some is leaked, it’s not your entire crown jewels. Work with your cyber insurer not just for financial risk transfer but as a partner in resilience many insurers now provide risk assessments or monitoring services as part of coverage. Leverage that to improve your posture proactively.

By following these best practices, organizations can drastically reduce both the likelihood of a ransomware incident and the impact if one occurs. The 2025 statistics show that companies who prepare with backups, training, etc. fared far better, many avoided paying and got back on their feet. No defense is 100% foolproof, but like preparing for a natural disaster, doing the drills and fortifying weak points can be the difference between a quick recovery vs. a company ending event.

Finally, let’s address some frequently asked questions FAQs to clarify common doubts about ransomware in 2025.

FAQs

• How often do ransomware attacks happen now?

Ransomware attacks occur with alarming frequency by 2025, on average one attack happens somewhere in the world every few seconds. Industry data suggest roughly 4,000 attacks per day globally. Some projections even say by 2031 it could be one every 2 seconds. For perspective, mid 2025 saw about 520 new victim organizations per month being listed on dark web leak sites, double the rate of 2024. So, at an organization scale, roughly one company is falling victim every 90 minutes on average. It’s a constant barrage.

• Is ransomware on the rise or decline in profitability?

The number of attacks is on the rise, but profitability per attack is declining. Attack volumes in 2025 hit record highs 34% more incidents YoY, but fewer victims are paying ransoms than ever payment rates 25–30% vs 85% a few years ago. Total criminal revenue from ransoms actually dropped 35% from 2023 to 2024, and likely further in 2025. This suggests ransomware’s business model is under pressure attackers are working harder more attacks for less return. Some groups have responded by going after bigger fish hence some huge payouts skewing averages, others are doing high volume attacks on softer targets. So ransomware isn’t going away, but the easy money era is fading, forcing evolutions in tactics.

• What is the average ransom payment now, and should victims ever pay?

The average ransom payment in 2024 was around $2.0M inflated by a few big payments, but by late 2024, the average of typical cases was closer to $500k and the median most common was around $100–$140k. In Q3 2025 Coveware reported an average of $376k and median $140k. So, most payments are in the six figure range now, not millions. As for paying: The consensus from law enforcement and experts is not to pay if at all possible. The stats back this paying often doesn’t fully resolve the issue only 46% got their data back properly even after paying, and 80% get hit again. Plus, paying funds further criminal activity. Exceptions might be if lives are literally on the line e.g., a hospital with no backups and patients at risk. But even then, it’s a gamble. Building the capability to restore without paying is the best strategy.

• How long does it take to recover from a ransomware attack?

It varies by preparedness and sector, but on average in 2025, organizations experienced about 24 days of downtime. Government entities had longer outages, averaging 27-28 days. Some well prepared companies have recovered in under a week 35% managed to be back in a week or less in 2024, though that dropped to 35% from 47% prior year. Conversely, about one third took more than a month to fully recover in 2024. Recovery includes not just getting systems decrypted/restored, but ensuring they are clean, rebuilding networks, etc. With good incident response and backups, many are able to resume core operations in a few days, but full restoration of all services can take weeks. And aftermath like investigations and strengthening security can stretch months. The key determinant is the quality of disaster recovery planning. Those who had plans and backups bounce back far faster.

• What are the most common ways ransomware gets in?

The top initial attack vectors are phishing/social engineering, compromised remote access RDP/VPN via stolen credentials, and exploitation of vulnerabilities in internet facing systems. Roughly 50% of incidents involve hackers using stolen or weak credentials to log in via RDP or VPN. About 18-20% start with a phishing email that tricks a user often to steal credentials or run malware. Around 30% begin with attackers exploiting an unpatched server or firewall device to gain entry. Other less common vectors include malicious USB drives, insider help, or supply chain compromises. In short, weak credentials and unpatched systems are big openings, and people still fall for targeted phishing, so those remain prime paths for ransomware actors.

• Are certain industries targeted more by ransomware?

Yes, ransomware actors prioritize industries where attacks can cause maximum disruption or yield valuable data. Currently, Manufacturing is the #1 targeted sector 26% of attacks, due to high downtime costs. Healthcare is also heavily hit attack rate 67% because of life critical urgency and sensitive data. Education and Government are frequently targeted as well they often have weaker security and high impact if shut down. Financial services and critical infrastructure energy, transportation are targeted too, though their defenses are usually stronger. Essentially, any sector with low tolerance for downtime production lines, hospitals, pipelines or high value data PII, intellectual property is in crosshairs. Recent data shows manufacturing, government, and healthcare leading in attack counts, with finance, education, and tech not far behind. Even sectors like real estate and professional services see attacks e.g., law firms for their client data. No sector is immune, but the tactics might differ e.g., attackers threaten data leaks for a law firm high confidentiality need whereas they threaten operational paralysis for a factory.

• What’s new in ransomware tactics we should worry about?

Several new tactics emerged: data theft without encryption pure extortion has become common so even if you have backups, attackers might try to extort over stolen data. Double extortion encrypt + leak threats is the norm now, and even triple extortion add DDoS attacks or harassment. Another is the move to cloud targets e.g., ransomware actors abusing cloud admin tools to encrypt or delete cloud data as in the AWS S3 Codefinger scenario. Also, recruiting insiders is a worrying trend bribing employees to deploy ransomware internally. On the social engineering front, deepfake voice/video phishing is a new threat attackers using AI to impersonate executives to subvert verification. One group stole $25M that way. We’re also seeing more multi stage attacks where ransomware is the final payload after a long stealth intrusion behaving more like nation state APTs. And on the malware side, ransomware targeting Linux/VMware ESXi servers is big attackers hit virtual infrastructure to encrypt many servers at once. Lastly, some gangs are experimenting with wiping or damaging data if victims don’t pay quickly punitive ransomware. Staying aware of these emerging tactics is key, as they require adjustments in defense like training staff about deepfakes, or monitoring for insider threats.

With the FAQs covered, we will conclude with a short wrap up of the state of ransomware in 2025 and key points to remember.

The Global Ransomware Threat in 2025 is a story of extremes. On one hand, we’ve seen an unprecedented surge in attack volume automated campaigns hammering away at organizations every minute, new groups popping up in the wake of cartel collapses, and extortion attempts hitting schools, hospitals, factories, and governments alike. The threat has evolved beyond just locking up files for money, it now involves stealing sensitive data, sabotaging cloud resources, and even enlisting insiders, all to squeeze value out of victims. The stats show ransomware actors have effectively industrialized their operations, with projections of 11,000 attacks per day indicating a near constant global assault.

On the other hand, defenders have mounted an effective response that is beginning to turn the tide on profitability. Companies fortified by immutable backups, incident response plans, and perhaps a dose of hard earned cynicism no longer trusting criminals to honor their word are increasingly calling the bluff of ransomware gangs. Payment rates collapsing to 25% is a testament to this resilience. A few years ago, the idea that three quarters of victims would refuse to pay was unthinkable. This shift, coupled with aggressive law enforcement actions, has forced a market correction in the cybercrime economy. Total ransom revenues are down, some notorious gangs are dismantled, and affiliates are scrambling.

Yet, as the data and trends illustrate, the battle is far from over. Instead, we are entering a new phase. Ransomware attacks have become a high volume, high complexity hazard more like a persistent background threat that every organization must anticipate, much like one designs buildings in California to withstand earthquakes. The adversaries are adapting: when encryption stopped yielding payouts, they pivoted to extortion via data theft, when perimeter defenses improved, they looked to cloud and insiders, when big game hunting became harder, they carpet bombed smaller prey.

For organizations, the overarching lesson from 2024–2025 is one of cautious optimism: you can withstand ransomware without paying if you prepare well, as evidenced by the 97% recovery stat and cases of successful restores. However, preparation is non-negotiable. Ransomware is testing every link in the chain technical, human, procedural. A weakness anywhere an unpatched server, an inattentive employee, an offline backup plan that was never tested can be exploited.

Going forward, expect ransomware to further morph. We may see more synergy with nation state actors, more attacks aimed at critical infrastructure as geopolitics heat up, and possibly the advent of ransomware powered by AI finding new ways to evade defenses. Conversely, we’ll also see improved international cooperation to counter it, better baseline security in organizations due to insurance and regulatory pressure, and continued sharing of decryption keys by authorities as happened with the NoMoreRansom project helping many victims.

In summary, the statistics of 2025 paint a picture of a threat that is simultaneously peaking and transforming. The frequency and aggressiveness of ransomware have never been greater, but neither has our collective capability to counter it. By learning from the data which weak points are exploited, what defenses are effective, how attackers behave when cornered we can strategize the next moves. Ransomware may never fully disappear as long as there is money to be made, but if current trends continue, we could witness its evolution from a rampant cash cow to a more contained, if persistent, hazard. Organizations that invest in resilience, practice good cyber hygiene, and stay informed will tip the balance further, making it increasingly difficult for ransomware gangs to terrorize the digital economy as they have in recent years. The war is not won, but the tide is turning and the numbers tell the story.

Sources: This report was compiled with data from numerous cybersecurity reports and surveys including Coveware quarterly ransomware trends, the IBM 2025 Cost of a Data Breach report, the Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report, industry analyses by Sophos, Check Point Research, DeepStrike research, BrightDefense statistics compilation, and incident chronicles from news sources. These sources collectively provide a factual basis for the trends and figures discussed.

About the Author

Mohammed Khalil is a Cybersecurity Architect at DeepStrike, specializing in advanced penetration testing and offensive security operations. With certifications including CISSP, OSCP, and OSWE, he has led numerous red team engagements for Fortune 500 companies, focusing on cloud security, application vulnerabilities, and adversary emulation. His work involves dissecting complex attack chains and developing resilient defense strategies for clients in the finance, healthcare, and technology sectors.