Ransomware encrypts or steals data to disrupt operations and extort victims, making backups, access controls, and incident response essential.
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Background for this topic.
Ransomware is malware used to deny access to systems or data, usually by encrypting files and demanding payment for decryption. Many operations also steal sensitive information and threaten to publish it, so an attack can create both an availability crisis and a privacy or disclosure risk. Initial access may involve phishing, stolen credentials, exposed remote services, or exploitation of unpatched vulnerabilities; attackers may then move through the network before deploying the payload.
Defenses should combine vulnerability management, phishing-resistant authentication where practical, endpoint and network monitoring, and backups that are isolated from routine administrator access and regularly tested for recovery. Organizations should also limit privileges and segment critical systems to reduce the blast radius. An incident requires rapid containment, preservation of forensic evidence, restoration from known-good backups, and assessment of notification, legal, and regulatory obligations. Threat intelligence can help identify relevant criminal infrastructure or tactics, but it does not replace sound access control, patching, detection, and recovery practices.
Weekly headline count for the current query.
Armenia has held a Russian tourist named Aleksandr Ermakov in a detention center since June 28, on a U.S. extradition request for a REvil ransomware suspect named Aleksandr Ermakov
A lot of this week’s trouble starts with something that looks close enough
The U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) has designated two individuals and a VPN service provider for enabling ransomware actors' and other cybercriminals' malicious activities, including ransomware attacks against Americans
Somewhere right now, a security tool is quietly finding bugs faster than any human can fix them. That's supposed to be the good news. The catch is that the attackers have the same tools, pointed the other way, and they don't file tickets
A 41-year-old former ransomware negotiator has been sentenced to nearly six years (i.e., 70 months) in prison in the U.S. for their role in conspiring with the now-defunct BlackCat ransomware operators to extort multiple victims and working with two other cybersecurity professionals to target additional victims in 2023
Microsoft has taken apart a destructive Windows backdoor it calls GigaWiper. What stands out is how it is built: not one tool but three older destructive programs bolted into one, offered as commands the operator can choose from
Cybersecurity researchers have flagged a new ransomware family called GodDamn that employs the PoisonX kernel driver to neutralize security software as part of its defense evasion strategy
A streaming box should not need a threat model. Neither should a username field, a demo repo, a reset flow, or a browser permission prompt. That is the irritating part this week: the risky pieces were ordinary
A U.S. government entity paid about $1 million to keep stolen files from being leaked, according to a new case study by Rakesh Krishnan for Ransom-ISAC, built on a leaked negotiation chat and the blockchain trail the payment left
Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a previously undocumented modular malware framework codenamed Avalon that's distributed by means of a multi-stage phishing chain capable of bypassing traditional security controls
Threat actors associated with the Anubis ransomware operation have been observed exploiting the Citrix Bleed 2 (CVE-2025-5777) vulnerability to obtain initial access
This week’s security news is mostly about weak spots
Security firm Sysdig says it has found what it believes is the first ransomware attack run from start to finish by an AI agent
The recently discovered financially-motivated FortiBleed campaign has been attributed to INC and Lynx ransomware operations, indicating that the verified, stolen credentials were intended for follow-on intrusions
Cybersecurity researchers have flagged a new malware artifact generated using DeepSeek that constructed a novel attack path combining "unrealistic browser-malware concepts with a real browser capability" to turn it into a working ransomware technique that runs entirely inside the browser on both Windows and Android devices
A coordinated law enforcement operation, in partnership with private sector companies, including Bitdefender, Bitsight, ESET, and Microsoft, has resulted in the takedown of criminal infrastructure powering Amadey and StealC
It’s Monday again
A new report from INTERPOL has revealed a "dramatic increase" in cybercrime in Asia and the South Pacific, fueled by rapid digitalization, internet penetration, new technologies, organized criminal networks, and a disparity in cybersecurity maturity
The Gentlemen ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) operation is actively developing and maintaining a suite of endpoint detection and response (EDR) killers that it hands out to affiliates for impairing system defenses before deploying the encryptor
Cybersecurity researchers have charted the evolution of INC from an nascent ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) operation to one of the most prolific cybercrime groups in 2026, claiming no less than 830 victims since August 2023