Why Ransomware Attacks Are Increasing Worldwide
Why Ransomware Attacks Are Increasing Worldwide
The numbers are staggering, the tactics are evolving, and 2026 is shaping up to be a record-breaking year.
Let me start with a number that should scare you. 389 percent.
That is how much ransomware victims increased year over year, according to Fortinet’s 2026 Global Threat Landscape Report. Confirmed victims reached 7,831 globally, up from about 1,600 the previous year .
And that is just the confirmed victims. The real number is almost certainly higher.
I have been following ransomware for years. I have seen it evolve from a nuisance to a national security threat. But what is happening in 2026 is different. The attacks are faster. The gangs are more organized. The money is bigger. And the bad guys are using artificial intelligence to do things that were impossible just a few years ago.
Let me break down exactly what is happening and why you should care.
The Numbers Do Not Lie
The first quarter of 2026 was brutal. Check Point Research counted 2,122 organizations listed on ransomware data leak sites during the quarter. That made it the second-highest first quarter on record .
Across more than 70 active leak sites tracked by researchers, the monthly average exceeded 700 victims. Month after month. No slowdown. No summer break. Just steady, relentless attacks .
Kaspersky’s telemetry tells a similar story. In Q1 2026 alone, their products protected 77,319 unique users from ransomware attacks. They detected 2,938 new ransomware variants. And March was the worst month, with 35,056 users encountering attacks .
Let me put that in perspective. That is nearly 35,000 people in a single month whose computers were hit by ransomware. And those are just the ones Kaspersky protected. The ones who did not have protection? We will never know.
The geographic distribution has shifted too. Pakistan, South Korea, and China topped the list of countries most attacked by ransomware Trojans in Q1 2026. The United States, while still a major target, represented only 48% of global ransomware victims in disclosed cases .
The Consolidation of Ransomware Gangs
Here is something interesting. The ransomware market is no longer expanding through a growing number of small actors. Instead, a narrower group of larger operators is taking a greater share of attacks .
The top 10 groups accounted for 71% of all victims in Q1 2026. That is a sharp shift from the more fragmented pattern seen through much of 2025 .
Who are these top players?
Qilin remained the most active operation for the third consecutive quarter, with 338 victims. The Gentlemen, a group that emerged no later than July 2025, rose to third place globally, climbing from 40 victims in the previous quarter to 166. LockBit posted 163 victims as it returned to the top tier after law enforcement disruptions .
Together, Qilin, Akira, The Gentlemen, and LockBit accounted for 41% of all victims. That is a huge concentration of firepower in just four groups .
Kaspersky’s data shows Clop ransomware returning to the top of the rankings at 14.42%, displacing Qilin (12.34%), which had held the leading position in the previous reporting period .
This concentration changes the risk profile for companies. Larger operations tend to be more organized, more consistent, and harder to disrupt. You are not dealing with a teenager in a basement anymore. You are dealing with organized crime syndicates running million-dollar enterprises.
The AI Revolution in Ransomware
Now let me tell you about the game-changer. Artificial intelligence.
Fortinet’s report found that ransomware victims rose 389 percent year over year, and they directly attribute much of this increase to AI tools being used by cybercriminals .
Here is how AI is making ransomware worse.
First, AI is enabling faster attacks. The time to exploit critical vulnerabilities after public disclosure now stands at 24 to 48 hours, compared with 4.76 days in earlier reporting. Active exploitation attempts were observed within hours of public disclosure of the React2Shell vulnerability .
Second, AI is improving reconnaissance. Attackers are using AI to conduct vulnerability and general research on victim organizations before they strike. They know your systems before you know they are looking .
Third, AI is enabling better social engineering. Real-time deepfake vishing attacks are now a reality. Attackers use AI to impersonate the voices of trusted executives or colleagues, bypassing traditional verification protocols .
Fourth, AI is lowering the barrier to entry. Less technical threat actors can now conduct sophisticated ransomware campaigns at scale. AI-advanced tooling and automation frameworks have effectively democratized cybercrime .
A staggering 78% of surveyed security professionals say AI has made ransomware attacks more effective. Conversely, only 6% believe AI tools have improved their own defenses .
We are in an asymmetric war. The attackers are adopting AI faster than the defenders. That is a problem.
Living Off the Land: The Credential Crisis
Here is another shift that is changing the game. Attackers are no longer breaking in. They are logging in.
Arctic Wolf’s 2026 Threat Report found that ransomware accounted for 44% of its incident response cases last year. And the most striking shift? Threat actors are using valid credentials to access systems .
Instead of exploiting software vulnerabilities, they are just logging in using stolen usernames and passwords. No alarms. No alerts. Just a normal login.
Infostealers have made this incredibly easy. One infection, and the attacker gets valid credentials. Then they just log in, move laterally, and take everything .
This shift is partly good news. Law enforcement takedowns have disrupted major malware families like Emotet, Trickbot, and IcedID. Those delivery mechanisms are no longer reliable. So attackers pivoted to something simpler: stealing credentials .
But it is also bad news because credential theft is harder to detect. Your firewall does not block a login that looks legitimate. Your intrusion detection system does not flag a user who is typing the right password.
The solution? Multi-factor authentication everywhere. No excuses.
The New Players: The Gentlemen and Others
While Qilin and LockBit are familiar names, a new group has burst onto the scene in 2026: The Gentlemen.
Emerging no later than July 2025, this group had already surpassed the activity levels of mainstays such as Akira and INC Ransom by Q1 2026 .
What makes The Gentlemen different? Their growth appears to be driven by a large stock of compromised network entry points. They are not relying on slow opportunistic exploitation. They have a pipeline of targets ready to go .
Their targeting is also different. Only 13% of their publicly extorted victims were based in the United States, compared with an ecosystem average of 49.6%. Instead, their activity is clustered in Asia-Pacific and Latin America .
Recent data shows The Gentlemen was the most active group in a 24-hour period in May 2026, with 10 victims, followed closely by Qilin with 9 .
The ransomware landscape is becoming globalized. Attackers are not just targeting the US anymore. They are going where the defenses are weaker.
The Database Extortion Economy
Not all ransomware looks like the Hollywood version. There is a hidden economy running on exposed databases that most people never hear about.
The Ransomnews Research Team spent five years tracking exposed databases, from May 2021 through May 2026. Their dataset covers 65,907 exposed systems across MongoDB, MySQL, Elasticsearch, Kibana, and HTTP-based admin panels .
Here is what they found. Of those, 30,515 databases, or 46.3%, already carried a ransom or wipe note when researchers found them. The compromised systems contained more than 215 billion records .
Here is the crazy part. Most attackers never get paid. Researchers extracted 514 distinct attacker wallets. Of the 512 wallets that could be traced, 318 had never received a payment. Zero bitcoin .
The total confirmed revenue across the entire dataset? 9.78 BTC, roughly $753,000. Spread across five years and 30,000 victims .
The damage, however, is enormous. 215 billion records exposed. Databases wiped. Operations disrupted. The damage is identical whether the victim pays or not.
Some engines are almost guaranteed to be compromised if exposed. Of 3,532 MongoDB instances found exposed, 3,525 carried a ransom note. MySQL was 2,930 out of 2,931. For these engines, exposure is not a probability of compromise. It is compromise .
The defensive lesson is brutally simple. Do not expose database engine ports to the public internet. Put them behind authentication, firewalls, and private subnets. If an exposed MongoDB instance appears online, the compromise has already happened.
The Backup Problem
Here is something that should keep every IT manager awake at night. Attackers are now targeting backups.
Security researchers warn that threat actors routinely try to locate and destroy online backups early in an attack. If they can delete your backups, you have no recovery option. You have to pay .
The solution is immutability. Backups need to be kept on separate infrastructure, shielded from deletion, and regularly tested. But even that is not enough. The capabilities around backups are equally important: visibility across critical systems and authentication logs, the ability to remediate quickly, and strong threat intelligence .
World Backup Day (yes, that is a real thing) has become a focal point for emphasizing the role of data protection. But one day a year is not enough. This needs to be a continuous process .
The Most Targeted Sectors
Not all industries are being hit equally. Some sectors are getting pummeled.
Manufacturing was the most targeted sector with 1,284 victims, according to Fortinet’s report. Business services followed with 824 victims, and retail with 682 .
Check Point’s January 2026 data showed Business Services accounting for 33% of ransomware disclosures, followed by Consumer Goods and Services at 15%, and Industrial Manufacturing at 11% .
Why manufacturing? Because downtime is devastating. A factory that cannot run loses millions per hour. Attackers know this. They target the sectors where companies have the strongest incentive to pay.
Healthcare, while not always topping the charts in raw victim counts, remains a high-concern sector because of the potential for patient harm. Attackers also know that hospitals often run older equipment that cannot be patched or protected by modern endpoint detection tools .
The Access Broker Economy
Behind every ransomware attack is someone who sold the initial access. These are called access brokers.
In March 2026, CRIL (Cyble Research & Intelligence Labs) recorded a highly active underground market for compromised access. The most targeted sectors for access sales were Professional Services (25%), Retail (20%), and IT & ITES .
A small group of threat actors, vexin, holyduxy, and algoyim, dominated this space, accounting for more than 55% of observed listings .
These access brokers play a critical upstream role. They enable ransomware attacks, espionage campaigns, and financial fraud operations. They are the wholesalers, selling entry points to the retailers who actually deploy the ransomware.
The prices vary. A compromised VPN credential might sell for a few hundred dollars. Full domain admin access to a mid-sized company might go for thousands. Either way, it is cheap compared to the potential payout.
The Law Enforcement Wins (and Losses)
It is not all bad news. Law enforcement has had some significant wins.
In January 2026, the FBI seized the domains of the RAMP cybercrime forum, a major platform used extensively by ransomware developers to advertise their RaaS programs and recruit affiliates .
A man suspected of links to the Phobos group was apprehended in Poland. In March, a Phobos ransomware administrator pleaded guilty to the creation and distribution of the Trojan, which had been used in international attacks dating back to at least November 2020 .
The US Department of Justice also charged a man who had acted as a negotiator for ransomware groups, alleging he colluded with the BlackCat threat actor to share privileged insights into ongoing negotiations .
But here is the problem. For every group that gets taken down, two more pop up. The takedown of RAMP disrupted a key element of the RaaS ecosystem, but the market adapts. LockBit was disrupted and has returned. The Gentlemen emerged from nowhere to become a top-tier threat.
Law enforcement is playing whack-a-mole. And the moles are winning.
What You Can Do
I have painted a grim picture. Record-high attacks. AI-powered criminals. Credential theft. Backup destruction. An organized underground economy.
But you are not helpless. Here is what you need to do.
**Enable multi-factor authentication everywhere.** No excuses. No “it is inconvenient.” If an attacker steals your password, MFA can still stop them. This is the single most effective control.
**Patch your systems.** The window to exploit critical vulnerabilities is now 24 to 48 hours. That means you need to patch within hours, not days or weeks. Automate your patching. Do not wait.
**Protect your backups.** Make them immutable. Keep them offline. Store them on separate infrastructure. Test them regularly. If an attacker cannot destroy your backups, they lose their leverage.
**Inventory your assets.** Many organizations lack full visibility of the technology, accounts, and SaaS tools in use across their business. You cannot protect what you do not know exists .
**Train your people.** The attackers are using AI-generated deepfakes and sophisticated phishing. Your employees need to be skeptical. Verify requests through a different channel. Hang up and call back.
**Use a VPN on public Wi-Fi.** Public networks are hunting grounds. Encrypt your traffic.
**Assume breach.** Have an incident response plan. Know who to call. Practice it. When an attack happens, you will not have time to figure it out from scratch.
The Bottom Line
Ransomware attacks are increasing worldwide because the economics work. The barrier to entry is lower than ever, thanks to AI and Ransomware-as-a-Service models. The payouts can be enormous. The risk of getting caught is relatively low.
The criminals are organized. They are professional. They are using AI to move faster and hit harder. And they are not going away.
But neither are we.
The numbers are scary. 389 percent year-over-year growth in victims. 2,122 organizations hit in just the first quarter. 77,319 individual users attacked. 30,515 exposed databases carrying ransom notes.
Do not be one of them.
Written by DDM ATIQ
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