Industrialized Ransomware: Confronting the New Reality

On Easter Weekend 2025, something was amiss at one retailer’s stores across the United Kingdom. Contactless payments failed. Click-and-collect orders vanished. Shelves emptied. 

Retailers depend on holiday weekends for revenue. Instead, this retailer would ultimately report a £300 million loss in market value, resort to pen and paper to track inventory, and shut down its entire online operation for more than six weeks.

The culprits were not nation-state actors or elite hackers but loosely affiliated groups of cybercriminals using commercially available ransomware as a service (RaaS) tools.

It’s enough to make you question your current security posture.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: Ransomware isn’t just evolving — it’s industrializing. And your security strategy could be leaving you exposed.

Ransomware spiked by 37% in 2024, accounting for 44% of data breaches globally, according to the Verizon 2025 Data Breach Investigations Report. In Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, 27% of enterprises experienced a ransomware attack in that same period. In Latin America, that figure hit 29%, with small and medium-sized businesses increasingly in the crosshairs.

But statistics don’t capture the operational chaos. 

The victim of the Easter Weekend attack had to revert to manual processes for billions of pounds of inventory. Another retailer shut down parts of its IT systems as a precautionary measure, leading to empty shelves across its more than 2,000 stores. A third organization restricted internet access. These weren’t just IT incidents — they were business crises.

Who were the attackers behind these breaches? They were reportedly members of Scattered Spider and DragonForce, groups that have weaponized social engineering to devastating effect. 

They don’t hack systems; they hack people. They call your help desk, impersonate employees, and convince your own IT staff to hand over credentials. Then they deploy ransomware that doesn’t just encrypt — it extorts, exfiltrates, and destroys.

Traditional ransomware locked your files and demanded payment. That playbook is obsolete.

Today’s attackers deploy multistage extortion campaigns that compound pressure from every angle. They encrypt your systems. They steal your data and threaten to publish it. They launch distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against your customer-facing infrastructure. And in some cases, they directly contact your customers, partners, and regulators.

The three historically most prominent ransomware groups‌ — ‌ALPHV/BlackCat, CL0P, and LockBit‌ — ‌have all conducted quadruple extortion campaigns. In February 2025, CL0P claimed responsibility for 385 attacks in just a few weeks, setting a new record for the most attacks ever attributed to a single group in one month, according to TechRadar.

This isn’t theoretical. It’s happening now, at scale, against organizations that considered themselves prepared.

While you’re experimenting with AI for productivity gains, threat actors are weaponizing it for attacks.

Groups like FunkSec and Black Basta have reportedly used generative AI and large language models (LLMs) to create ransomware code and enhance social engineering attacks, according to Akamai’s Ransomware Report 2025. Forest Blizzard (aka Fancy Bear) and Emerald Sleet have leveraged LLMs to mimic official documents in phishing campaigns and conduct vulnerability research. Tools like WormGPT, DarkGPT, and FraudGPT are democratizing sophisticated attack techniques.

The result? Attackers can now operate with unprecedented scale, sophistication, and efficiency‌ — ‌while your security team is drowning in alerts.

Despite the escalating threat, organizations are changing their behavior. Total ransomware payments nearly doubled to US$1.1 billion in 2023, according to cryptocurrency-tracing firm Chainalysis. Yet the percentage of victims that actually paid ransom demands dropped to a record low of 29% in Q4 2023, down from 85% in early 2019, according to ransomware negotiation firm Coveware.

Why? Because paying doesn’t guarantee recovery. It doesn’t prevent re-infection. And it only funds the next generation of attacks.

The better question: Why are organizations still finding themselves in positions where paying is even an option?

Your current security architecture likely assumes a perimeter that no longer exists. It relies on detection systems that generate more noise than insight. It treats ransomware as an endpoint problem when it’s actually a lateral movement crisis.

Research from Akamai's 2025 Segmentation Impact study tells a different story. Among the 1,200 global security leaders surveyed, 79% have experienced or detected at least one ransomware attack on their organization in the last 24 months. That's not a ransomware problem‌ — ‌that's a containment problem.

The organizations that are winning this fight aren’t the ones with the most expensive tools. They're the ones that have fundamentally rethought how they architect resilience.

Here’s what the data shows: enterprises using microsegmentation contain ransomware attacks 21.4% faster on average. For large organizations with more than US$1 billion in revenue, that figure jumps to 33% faster containment times.

Why does this matter? Because, for major retailers, every minute of downtime during a ransomware incident can cost millions. When your payment systems are down, when your supply chain is frozen, when your customer data is being exfiltrated‌ — ‌speed isn’t just important. It’s vital.

Microsegmentation works because it operates on a fundamentally different principle than traditional security. Instead of trying to prevent every intrusion, it assumes a breach and focuses on containment. It creates granular security zones that limit lateral movement, preventing attackers from pivoting across your environment even after an initial compromise.

The Easter Weekend breach reportedly began through a third-party IT help desk. Social engineering gave attackers initial access. But what turned that initial compromise into a catastrophic business disruption was the threat actors’ ability to move laterally across systems to escalate privileges and encrypt critical infrastructure.

Microsegmentation could have contained that blast radius.

The Easter Weekend breach started with a third-party contractor. Your security is only as strong as your weakest vendor. Require security audits, enforce access controls, and segment third-party access ruthlessly.

Most incident response plans focus on detection and notification. That’s necessary but insufficient. You need documented containment procedures that can be executed in minutes, not hours. Know exactly which systems to isolate, which data to protect, and which communications to activate before an attack occurs.

Run tabletop exercises. Conduct breach simulations. Test the integrity and recovery speed of your backups. The British retailer reportedly had no business continuity plans for cyber incidents. Don't wait for an Easter Weekend crisis to discover your gaps.

Every CISO must ask the following questions:

1. When the next attack comes — and it will come — can we contain it in minutes instead of days?
2. Can we prevent lateral movement across our environment? 
3. Can we protect our most critical assets even when perimeter defenses fail? 
4. Can we maintain business operations while simultaneously investigating and remediating an active breach?

If you can’t confidently answer yes to these questions, you’re not prepared. You’re exposed.

Again, the organizations that will survive the ransomware era aren’t the ones with the biggest security budgets. They’re the ones that have architected resilience into every layer of their infrastructure. They’ve assumed a breach, planned for containment, and built systems that limit the blast radius even when prevention fails.