How Organizations Can Stay Ahead of Modern Ransomware

Ransomware remains among the most persistent and damaging threats in cybersecurity, defying stronger defenses, larger budgets and heightened awareness as attackers continue to outpace defenders. At a recent CTO briefing I hosted alongside cybersecurity veteran Michael Gorelik, we examined what makes today’s ransomware so dangerous and how defenders must adapt.

The findings were as alarming as they were insightful: while reported ransomware incidents slightly declined in 2024, financial damages surged. According to Coveware, median payouts jumped by 80%, with average ransom demands hovering around $500,000 to $600,000. Attackers are optimizing for ROI, and businesses — especially those with incomplete or compromised backup strategies — are paying the price.

From volume to precision 

Ransomware operators have grown increasingly surgical. The spray-and-pray phishing campaigns of yesterday have been replaced by reconnaissance-driven intrusions that target specific vulnerabilities in high-value systems. Groups like RansomHub and Akira, for instance, are leveraging deep knowledge of enterprise environments to bypass detection and maximize leverage. 

We’re seeing attackers use the same tools defenders rely on — system APIs, remote administration utilities, native encryption services. And they’re doing so while cloaking their activity through sophisticated evasion techniques. These actors aren’t just coding malware; they’re running businesses. 

A look at recent high-profile incidents reveals the stakes. In late 2024 and early 2025:

• Change Healthcare suffered $2.5 billion in damages.
• CDK Global faced collective losses of $1 billion, including a $25 million ransom.
• Cencora Pharmaceutical paid the largest known ransom to date: $75 million.
• Ascension Healthcare lost $1.3 billion after 5.6 million records were exposed.

 These aren’t just cybersecurity failures, they’re board-level events with enterprise-wide consequences. 

Ransomware’s most dangerous strains 

In our recent discussion, we dove deep into the latest ransomware strains, which are redefining the threat model for defenders. Here’s what we came up with: 

Mimic Ransomware uses a distributed architecture that splits its functions across multiple processes. Rather than relying on a single thread to enumerate files, propagate laterally, and execute encryption, Mimic delegates each function separately. This fragmentation evades behavior-based detection, which often looks for known activity patterns within a single process. It also features a watchdog component that restarts the operation if disrupted and exfiltrates data via legitimate tools like the Edge browser to cloud storage services. 

ShrinkLocker, meanwhile, abuses BitLocker — Microsoft’s native encryption tool — to render systems unusable. It shrinks disk partitions to create space for a malicious boot loader, encrypts critical data using random keys, and disables standard recovery mechanisms. Because it relies on native OS functions rather than custom cryptography, traditional decryption tools are useless. Victims are left entirely dependent on whether they maintained secure, offline backups. 

RansomHub pushes evasion even further, rebooting compromised systems into Safe Mode before executing its payload, disabling most endpoint security solutions in the process. It escalates privileges via COM objects, re-enables admin accounts, resets passwords, and deletes all forensic evidence before wiping itself from disk. It even includes a whitelist of languages — if the target speaks Russian or another whitelisted language, the ransomware quietly exits. 

These examples highlight how ransomware is no longer a singular tool — it’s an adaptive ecosystem. The days of generic, opportunistic attacks are giving way to highly curated operations that exploit the blind spots in enterprise defense. 

The AI factor 

One of the most concerning trends is the use of artificial intelligence to accelerate the ransomware lifecycle. Attackers are leveraging AI to scan for vulnerabilities, prioritize targets, and craft believable phishing lures or impersonation scripts.

Clop’s 2025 campaign against managed file transfer systems like Cleo is a case in point. While not as devastating as MOVEit or Accellion breaches, it demonstrated how AI can compress the time between vulnerability disclosure and weaponization. Clop carried out more than 80 ransomware events in Q1 2025 alone, with some compromises happening within hours of public CVE publication. 

Prevention is the new imperative

 For defenders, the implications are clear: detection alone is no longer enough. Traditional endpoint detection and response (EDR) tools are reactive by design. They alert when something suspicious has already happened. In the face of modern ransomware strains that can execute in Safe Mode or disguise themselves as legitimate processes, that’s often too late.

Organizations must adopt a prevention-first mindset. That means:

• Reducing the attack surface by patching known vulnerabilities and eliminating misconfigurations.
• Implementing layered defenses that include endpoint prevention, network segmentation, and email security.
• Maintaining secure, offline backups that are inaccessible from compromised environments.
• Training employees to recognize social engineering and impersonation tactics.
• Building proactive incident response plans that are tested and updated regularly.

 Equally important is the ability to integrate prevention technologies with existing EDR and XDR platforms. Ransomware defense isn’t about replacing your stack—it’s about augmenting it with early-stage controls that stop execution before encryption begins.

Small targets, big risk 

One of the most persistent myths is that ransomware only targets large enterprises. In reality, many smaller businesses — including law firms, clinics, and regional service providers — are prime targets due to the sensitivity of their data and limited security resources. 

During the Q&A portion of our briefing, we discussed a case where a five-person law office was hit by the Akira ransomware group and ended up paying $1.5 million. The attackers had reviewed the firm’s public profile, determined its likely reliance on uptime, and struck when defenses were lowest. 

Smaller organizations must prioritize fundamentals: patch high-risk systems, outsource to reputable managed service providers, and ensure incident response plans are simple, fast, and effective. Ransomware protection as a service is becoming more accessible — and necessary — than ever. 

The road ahead

Is it possible to be fully secure against ransomware? No. But it is possible to become a significantly harder target — so difficult, in fact, that attackers move on to less-prepared victims. 

The future of ransomware defense lies in early prevention, pre-execution controls, and minimizing the blast radius of successful attacks. We must stop treating ransomware as an anomaly and start treating it as a certainty. Whether you’re a Fortune 500 company or a five-person firm, the message is the same: it’s not a question of if, but when. 

By embracing a layered, prevention-first strategy, organizations can shift from reactive damage control to proactive resilience. Because in today’s threat landscape, readiness is not a luxury — it’s a requirement.