If you thought ransomware was a 2021 problem, Q1 2026 would like a word.
In the first three months of this year alone, more than two thousand organisations were listed on ransomware leak sites, making it the second-highest Q1 on record.
Check Point, Kaspersky, and others all agree: total volume has stabilized at a punishingly high baseline, while the number of active groups keeps climbing. We saw a record 124 named groups in 2025 and nearly 7,200 publicly disclosed incidents.
We are not dealing with the same ransomware from five years ago. The lock screen is still there, but the business model around it has evolved into something far more resilient. Here is why it is still a constant threat in 2026.
The Business Got More Concentrated & Professional
2025 was the year of fragmentation. After law enforcement takedowns of LockBit, RAMP, and LeakBase in early 2026, everyone expected a lull. The opposite happened.
Affiliates simply moved. Codebases were reused, infrastructure was shared, and new brands emerged in weeks rather than years.
In Q1 2026 that consolidation snapped back. The top 10 groups accounted for 71% of all victims, reversing the chaos of 2025. Qilin posted 338 victims to remain the most active for three quarters straight, Clop surged back to the top with 14.42% of leak-site activity, and newcomers like The Gentlemen went from 40 victims in Q4 2025 to 166 in Q1 2026. Even LockBit confirmed a comeback with 163 victims.
Fewer, bigger, better-run gangs means faster attack cycles, repeatable playbooks, and 24/7 negotiation desks. NordStellar’s analysis of leaked Q1 negotiations found attackers threatening to leak data in 76% of cases while offering discounts in 45.5%; literally upselling victims on “security audits”.
It is not a hack anymore. It is an industrial sales operation.
Encryption Is Now Optional
The classic model, break in, encrypt everything, demand Bitcoin, is becoming the minority.
Kaspersky’s International Anti-Ransomware Day report for 2026 flags the continued rise of “encryption-less” extortion. Why risk triggering EDR, backups, and a full incident response when you can just steal 2TB of sensitive data and threaten to publish it?
Recorded Future estimates that roughly 50% of what we now label “ransomware” is actually pure data theft plus extortion. It is quieter, faster, and in an era of strict GDPR, SEC disclosure rules, and customer breach notification laws, it is just as painful. Victims pay not to decrypt, but to not be shamed.
In March 2026, business services (35%), consumer goods (14%), and industrial manufacturing (13%) were the top three sectors hit. What do they have in common? Downtime costs money, and data exposure costs trust.
Hackers don’t need to lock your factory if leaking your CAD files and payroll data does the same job.
The Front Door Has Changed
Ransomware groups don’t hack you. They log in.
Initial Access Brokers (IABs), specialists who sell pre-compromised access, are more central than ever. Their preferred product in 2026? RDWeb portals and network appliances.
Kaspersky and others tracked heavy exploitation of zero-days in edge devices. The Interlock group, for example, has been exploiting CVE-2026-20131 in Cisco Secure FMC firewall management software since January 26 to get root code execution. No phishing email needed. You patch your laptops, but your firewall, VPN concentrator, and file transfer appliance are still internet-facing.
Now to all this add AI-driven credential stuffing and phishing.
US companies are reporting a surge in AI-driven attacks this year, with incidents at names from Nike to health insurers. And when credentials and exploits fail, groups are recruiting insiders; Recorded Future predicts 2026 will see a sharp rise in native English speakers being paid to become corporate insiders.
Defences Are Being Actively Killed
The defender stack got better. So, the attacker stack adapted to disable it.
2025 and 2026 saw the normalization of “EDR killers”, tools specifically designed to disable endpoint detection and response before the payload runs. They have become a standard component of attacks, not an exotic extra.
At the same time, new families are adopting post-quantum cryptography ciphers. That sounds like sci-fi, but the logic is brutal: if you steal data today that you can’t decrypt, or encrypt data today that might be decrypted by a future quantum computer, you lose leverage. By using PQC standards now, groups are future-proofing their extortion.
Kaspersky detected 6 new families and 2,938 new modifications in Q1 2026 alone, protecting 77,319 unique users from ransomware Trojans in that quarter. The cat-and-mouse game is accelerating.
The Economics Still Work, Even When Payments Don’t
Here is the paradox: ransomware groups made *less* money in 2025 despite a 47% increase in publicly reported attacks. Payment rates are down. More companies refuse to pay, have better backups, and law enforcement is faster.
So why continue? Because the cost of an attack has collapsed.
With ransomware-as-a-service, leaked builders, and gig workers handling spam, translation, and negotiation, a small group can run a global campaign for a few thousand dollars. Even with lower payment conversion, global payments were still estimated at around $850 million. And when encryption fails to pay, they pivot to DDoS-as-a-Service, insider recruitment, and re-extortion of the same victim, 83% of victims who pay are attacked again, according to CrowdStrike data.
The GRIT 2026 report called 2025 the most active year ever recorded, with a 58% year-over-year increase in reported victims. Fragmentation, faster cycles, and AI acceleration were the drivers. In other words, even when we win battles, the war gets more efficient for the other side.
What This Means for You in Late 2026
Ransomware is no longer an IT problem you solve with an antivirus and offline backups. It is a business continuity risk that looks like this:
Assume breach of identity, not just malware.
Audit RDWeb, VPN, and edge appliances with the same urgency as endpoints. Rotate credentials, enforce phishing-resistant MFA, and monitor for Initial Access Broker listings of your own domains.
Prepare for leak, not just lock.
Your incident response plan needs a data-exposure workflow: legal, PR, customer notification, and leak-site monitoring. Encryption-less attacks don’t care about your backups.
Test your EDR’s resilience.
Ask your security team: what happens when the attacker tries to kill the EDR first? Do you have tamper protection, out-of-band telemetry, or a secondary detection layer to maintain visibility and response capability if the primary agent is compromised?
Reduce the blast radius of downtime.
Hackers target business services and manufacturing because every hour offline hurts. Segment your network so a compromised marketing portal does not become a halted production line.
In Conclusion
Ransomware has survived every obituary written for it because it is not a piece of software. It is an economy. Economies adapt to regulation, to disruption, and to defence. They globalize,2026 is predicted to be the first-year new actors outside Russia outnumber those inside it.
They professionalize.
They learn.
Until the cost of attacking consistently exceeds the cost of defending, that leak site counter will keep ticking well into 2027.