Ransomware has emerged as the most significant cybersecurity threat facing modern organizations, with research revealing that 45% of organizational leaders identify ransomware as their top cyber risk concern, and more than half of all organizations globally have reported experiencing at least one ransomware attack in recent years. The attack landscape extends far beyond large corporations and critical infrastructure, affecting organizations of every size, across virtually every industry, and spanning both the public and private sectors. Understanding who faces the greatest risk requires examining the complex interplay of organizational characteristics, technical vulnerabilities, human factors, and geopolitical dynamics that make certain entities attractive targets for sophisticated ransomware operators. This comprehensive analysis explores the multifaceted vulnerability landscape to identify which organizations and individuals face the most pressing ransomware threats in 2025.
Critical Infrastructure Sectors Under Unprecedented Attack
The deliberate targeting of critical infrastructure has transformed ransomware from a nuisance affecting individual organizations into a systemic threat to national security and societal resilience. Between January and September 2025, global ransomware attacks against critical industries surged by 34% compared to the same period in 2024, with nearly half of all ransomware incidents now targeting sectors vital to national resilience. This escalation reflects a fundamental shift in attacker motivation and sophistication, with cybercriminal groups increasingly viewing ransomware not merely as a financial opportunity but as a strategic tool capable of causing cascading disruptions across entire economies and societies. The manufacturing sector has experienced particularly severe targeting, with attacks surging 61% compared with the previous year, with high-profile incidents including Jaguar Land Rover’s global shutdown and Bridgestone’s production disruptions demonstrating how even brief ransomware incidents can paralyze supply chains and ripple across interconnected industries.
Healthcare organizations face especially acute risks, both from the scale of attacks and from the direct human consequences of compromise. Ransomware attacks on healthcare facilities have increased 300% since 2015, creating conditions where patient safety is directly threatened. Research from the University of California San Diego revealed that ransomware attacks on hospitals cause a spillover effect where neighboring hospitals see surges in patient volume, with cardiac arrest cases jumping 81% and survival rates dropping significantly. The Synnovis attack on a London pathology services provider demonstrated how a single ransomware incident can disrupt blood testing and transfusions across multiple hospitals, delaying critical cancer treatments and elective procedures across several institutions. One analysis estimates that between 42 and 67 Medicare patients died as a result of ransomware attacks between 2016 and 2021, highlighting the documented but underreported human cost of these incidents. Hospitals depend heavily on digital systems for patient care management, and when systems go offline, the consequences extend beyond operational disruption to potentially tragic health outcomes. The critical nature of healthcare services combined with sensitive patient data makes hospitals attractive targets for attackers who understand that healthcare organizations face extreme pressure to restore operations quickly.
Energy and utilities infrastructure represents another category of critical infrastructure under sustained attack pressure. These sectors control essential services—power, water, gas, and communications—that societies depend upon for basic functioning. The 2025 threat landscape shows that energy providers face constant targeting from financially motivated cybercriminal groups as well as nation-state actors with geopolitical objectives. When ransomware actors successfully compromise energy infrastructure, the potential consequences extend beyond financial costs to include community-wide disruptions in electricity, water, and gas services. This creates negotiating leverage that makes energy companies particularly willing to pay ransoms to restore critical services quickly. Cybersecurity experts have noted that evidence suggests Russia directs ransomware operators to target sectors like healthcare, energy, and food supply chains, aligning these attacks with strategic geopolitical objectives while maintaining plausible deniability. The vulnerabilities within this sector stem partly from neglected critical infrastructure cybersecurity and the reluctance to invest in modernization of operational technology systems that remain essential to operations but may lack contemporary security controls.
Government agencies at federal, state, and local levels face ransomware risks that uniquely threaten democratic institutions and public services. Federal and local agencies have large attack surfaces consisting of many different departments and legacy systems with inconsistent cybersecurity measures, creating numerous entry points for attackers. Public sector organizations are particularly attractive targets for ransomware operators because governments often possess sensitive national security information, citizen personal data, and the ability to pay substantial ransoms to protect public services and national interests. Local government agencies in particular may have limited cybersecurity resources despite managing critical services, making them vulnerable to attacks that can disable emergency response coordination, water utility billing and monitoring, and payroll processing. The 2019 Baltimore ransomware attack, which exploited weaknesses in outdated municipal systems, cost the city over $18 million in recovery expenses and lost revenue, demonstrating the substantial financial impact of compromise.
High-Vulnerability Business Sectors
Beyond critical infrastructure, particular business sectors have become primary targets for ransomware operators based on the combination of sensitive data they hold, the criticality of their services, and the likelihood that they will pay ransom demands. Manufacturing has emerged as one of the most heavily targeted sectors globally, accounting for 65% of reported ransomware incidents in Q2 2025 among industrial entities. Within manufacturing, construction companies represent a particularly vulnerable subsector, accounting for 110 of the 428 manufacturing incidents recorded in Q2 2025. The manufacturing sector’s vulnerability stems from multiple factors: the digitalization of production systems creates dependencies on interconnected operational technology networks; ransomware attacks that shut down production lines create immediate financial pressure that makes ransom payment seem economically justified; and supply chain disruptions from manufacturing compromises cascade through dependent industries. Manufacturing facilities employ assembly lines, material handling systems, and furnaces that require physical machines connected to operational technology systems, and when ransomware disrupts control of these systems, attackers can paralyze production and create manufacturing delays that affect global supply chains.
Financial services organizations face intense ransomware pressure due to the combination of their access to substantial liquid funds, their management of customer financial data, and the operational disruption that a successful attack would cause to financial markets. Financial institutions experienced a 64% increase in ransomware attacks in 2023, and this escalation has continued through 2025. The financial services sector presents an attractive target profile for ransomware operators because successful attacks create severe operational disruption that makes institutions eager to pay ransoms to restore normal operations quickly. Financial institutions hold vast amounts of sensitive customer data, manage substantial funds, and operate in an increasingly digital environment where legacy technology remains crucial to operations despite lacking contemporary security safeguards. Banks often rely on outdated systems that were designed before cybersecurity became a critical concern, creating environments where modern ransomware can proliferate relatively unchecked. The regulatory environment further pressures financial institutions to pay ransoms, as regulators like the New York Department of Financial Services maintain intense scrutiny of these organizations’ ability to maintain operations.
Educational institutions—including schools, universities, and research facilities—have become targets specifically because of their limited budgets for cybersecurity and the relatively low level of risk awareness among staff and students. Ransomware attacks on educational institutions surged 69% in the first quarter of 2025 compared to the same period in 2024, with educational institutions remaining particularly vulnerable to compromise. Universities and schools collect and store extensive personal data on students, alumni, faculty, and staff including Social Security numbers, home addresses, health records, and financial information. Educational institutions often use complex and outdated infrastructure relying on an assortment of vendors and legacy systems that can be difficult to secure, with a lack of centralized cybersecurity across networks further increasing vulnerabilities. Many educational institutions face tight budgets that limit their cybersecurity capabilities, with cybersecurity spending accounting for only 3-12% of a university’s IT budget, often too little to counter modern threats. Universities also rely heavily on hypervisor technology to manage virtualized environments, and hypervisors represent particularly attractive attack vectors because compromising a single hypervisor can potentially expose every virtual machine it manages.
Healthcare extends beyond hospitals to encompass insurance providers, clinics, and health information management firms, all of which hold sensitive patient data. Across healthcare organizations broadly, ransomware remains a top target sector because threat actors understand that healthcare organizations are willing to pay ransoms quickly to restore patient care capabilities. The estimated average cost of a healthcare ransomware incident reached $4.02 million in 2024, nearly quadrupling from $1.06 million the year before, and 67% of healthcare victims opt to pay ransom to regain access. This willingness to pay has made healthcare persistently attractive to ransomware operators despite law enforcement warnings against ransom payment.
Vulnerabilities of Small and Medium-Sized Businesses
While ransomware headlines often focus on large corporations and critical infrastructure, small and medium-sized businesses face disproportionate ransomware risk relative to their size. Research reveals that ransomware represents 88% of cybersecurity attacks on SMBs compared to just 39% for large companies, indicating that SMBs are specifically targeted by ransomware operators at rates substantially exceeding those for large enterprises. This targeting pattern reflects conscious decisions by ransomware operators who have shifted focus toward SMBs as larger organizations have improved their defenses and adopted increasingly skeptical attitudes toward ransom payment. Small businesses often mistakenly believe they are too small to attract hacker attention, yet this underestimation of risk creates a dangerous false sense of security. Attackers actually prefer SMBs because they tend to have weaker defenses compared to large enterprises, making successful compromise more likely. Additionally, threat actors deliberately adjust their financial demands based on target size, with SMBs facing lower ransoms than large enterprises but still demands that can exceed the organization’s ability to pay without threatening its survival.
The impact of ransomware attacks proves relatively more devastating for SMBs than for large organizations because smaller businesses often lack the resources for rapid recovery and may have no insurance coverage or inadequate cyber insurance. The average downtime following a ransomware attack is around 21 days, during which SMBs cannot access critical systems or data, resulting in millions in lost revenue. For many SMBs, a single successful ransomware attack creates a choice between paying the ransom demand and ceasing operations entirely. Research on the Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report revealed that a stunning 88% of breaches in SMBs involved ransomware attacks, far surpassing the 39% rate in larger enterprises. Operators carefully adjust their financial demands when targeting SMBs, recognizing that while large enterprises might face million-dollar ransoms, SMBs with lower revenue should receive proportionally lower demands that they might actually be able to pay. This professionalization of the SMB targeting approach—where ransomware groups operate with tiered pricing for different organization types—demonstrates how thoroughly ransomware has become a commoditized criminal business model.
An important distinction emerges when examining SMB vulnerability patterns: smaller organizations (100-250 employees) show higher vulnerability to compromise through credential theft, while larger entities (501-1,000 employees) disproportionately experience compromised through exploited vulnerabilities. This difference likely reflects the greater likelihood that SMBs lack multi-factor authentication and credential management systems that would protect against stolen credentials. SMBs also tend to struggle with maintaining current software updates, making them vulnerable to known exploitable vulnerabilities that large organizations likely have already patched. One in three SMBs experienced a cyberattack in the past year, with 94% of SMBs considering cybersecurity critical to their business success. Yet despite recognizing the threat, many SMBs lack the technical expertise and resources to implement comprehensive cybersecurity measures, creating persistent vulnerability despite organizational awareness.
Emerging High-Risk Sectors and Industries
Beyond traditional critical infrastructure and business sectors, several emerging industry categories have become increasingly attractive targets for ransomware operators, reflecting the evolving threat landscape and operator innovation in target selection. The construction and building industries represent an emerging concentration of ransomware activity, with cybercriminals targeting this sector specifically because of its rapid digital transformation coupled with limited cybersecurity resources. Construction companies increasingly rely on vulnerable IoT-enabled heavy machinery, Building Information Modeling systems, and cloud-based project management platforms that create attack surfaces for exploitation. The building and construction sector has become particularly vulnerable to social engineering and phishing attacks due to several unique operational characteristics: dispersed mobile workforces working across multiple job sites find it challenging to verify unexpected requests or consult with IT teams in real time; the urgency to complete high-value transactions under tight project deadlines encourages employees to bypass verification procedures; and the complex supply chains involving frequent interactions with unfamiliar subcontractors provide opportunities for attackers to infiltrate ongoing conversations undetected.
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Get Protected NowNonprofits have emerged as a significant and increasingly targeted risk category, with research revealing that nonprofits have become the second most targeted sector by cybercriminals, accounting for 31% of all notifications of nation-state attacks. The combination of sensitive data, sprawling networks, and limited cybersecurity resources creates ideal conditions for attack, with six out of ten nonprofits having experienced a cyberattack in the last two years. Nonprofits hold exactly the type of information attackers want—donor details, financial records, client data, and internal documents—making them valuable targets despite their often minimal technical and financial resources for defense. Part of the reason ransomware operators target nonprofits with particular interest is that cyberattackers may not initially realize they have compromised a nonprofit, gaining access via malware and then potentially selling that access to different actors who subsequently deploy ransomware. However, evidence increasingly suggests that ransomware groups are now intentionally targeting nonprofits, recognizing that while they have significant funds but poor security or support capabilities, making them attractive prey. Notably, some ransomware groups have even developed pricing tiers for nonprofits, indicating the growing professionalization of targeting approaches. One nonprofit supported by the CyberPeace Institute faced a ransomware attack where attackers initially demanded a sum that would effectively shut down the organization, but after learning it was a nonprofit, offered a “discount,” demonstrating how completely ransomware has become professionalized as a business model with organizational structure.
The transportation and logistics sector faces particularly severe and growing ransomware threats, with maritime ransomware surging 467% year-on-year, and the sector accounting for 38% of attacks overall in the transportation industry. Ransomware is the primary threat to transportation, followed by DDoS attacks and phishing, and the most affected segments globally include air transport (32%), rail (28%), maritime (24%), and road transport (16%). Transportation and logistics companies are attractive targets because attacking them can paralyze shipping systems, fleets, and ticketing operations, affecting global trade. The sector’s reliance on legacy IT and OT systems, third-party vendors, and highly interconnected networks creates numerous unprotected interfaces that serve as potential gateways for attackers. The high-profile 2017 NotPetya attack on Maersk, the world’s largest oceangoing shipping company, resulted in $300 million in losses and destroyed virtually all domain controllers except one that survived due to a power outage in Ghana. Every unprotected interface in transportation and logistics networks represents a potential vulnerability, and the sector’s critical role in global trade creates both financial motivation for ransom payment and geopolitical motivation for state-sponsored compromise.
Law firms and professional services companies face rising ransomware targeting because they hold extensive volumes of sensitive and valuable information, including intellectual property, litigation strategies, financial records, and confidential client communications. Recent high-profile breaches highlight the severity: HWL Ebsworth experienced a cyberattack exposing 3.6TB of sensitive client and government data; Shook Lin & Bok paid approximately $1.89 million in ransom after a ransomware attack; and the infamous Mossack Fonseca breach revealed 11 million confidential files through inadequate cybersecurity. The legal sector’s vulnerability stems from multiple factors: 25% of U.S. law firms experienced cyberattacks in 2023; 60% of UK legal breaches resulted from insider actions; and cybersecurity incidents at law firms increased from 25% in 2021 to 27% in 2022. Law firms cannot afford operational downtime because it disrupts critical litigation and transactions, and professional services organizations more generally face substantial pressure to pay ransoms to restore normal operations quickly.
The hospitality industry has experienced dramatic ransomware targeting, with the average cost of a hospitality data breach reaching $4.03 million in 2025. Hotels, casinos, and hospitality organizations are attractive targets for multiple reasons: they rely on broad ranges of connected technologies to provide seamless guest experiences; many hospitality organizations were historically slow to adapt to modern cybersecurity requirements; and successful attacks directly impact guest experiences, creating pressure for rapid resolution. High-profile incidents including the MGM Resorts attack, which disrupted reservations systems and forced digital room keys to fail, and the Motel One compromise, where attackers claimed to have stolen 24 million files and credit card data, demonstrate the scale of compromise possible in hospitality. By 2025, 60% of hotel cyberattacks are projected to stem from vulnerabilities in connected devices such as point-of-sale terminals and IoT equipment, which are often overlooked in routine security measures.
Real estate professionals and brokerages face 60% rates of cybersecurity incidents, with average recovery costs exceeding $500,000 per incident. The real estate industry is particularly vulnerable because sensitive client data, transactional documents, and high-value wire transfers are all online and vulnerable, and real estate professionals are especially susceptible to urgent-looking emails because the industry operates at a fast pace where missed communications can mean lost transactions. An attack affecting a popular MLS service provider in August 2023 left it inaccessible for weeks, preventing affected real estate agents from listing homes, changing prices, or marking properties as pending, ultimately impacting an estimated 5% of real estate agents nationwide.
Media and entertainment organizations have been targeted by ransomware at rates approaching 60%, with attackers specifically targeting media operations to gain access to content and derail operations. Large organizations such as Disney and Sony, as well as A-list celebrities, have faced ransomware attacks, and the complexity and number of these attacks continue growing. The most valuable asset for media and entertainment companies is content, and cybercriminals recognize that attacking content delivery systems or stealing content provides leverage for ransom demands while also enabling content theft and resale.
Geographic and Regional Risk Concentration
The geographic distribution of ransomware attacks reveals significant concentration patterns, with certain countries and regions facing disproportionate targeting that reflects both economic attractiveness and geopolitical considerations. The United States remains the epicenter of ransomware activity, accounting for roughly 1,000 incidents representing about 21% of global attacks in 2025, followed by Canada, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Italy. This concentration in wealthier, digitally mature markets reflects the dual motivation of ransomware operators to maximize ransom profits from organizations with substantial financial resources while simultaneously testing the resilience of industries central to U.S. national security and global supply chains. Within the United States, certain sectors experience particularly intense targeting concentrated in regions with major manufacturing or financial centers.
Europe ranks as the second largest e-crime target globally, with European organizations accounting for nearly 22% of global ransomware and extortion victims. Within Europe, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, and Spain were the most targeted nations, with 92% of cases involving file encryption combined with data theft. Ransomware operations in Europe have accelerated substantially, with groups such as SCATTERED SPIDER increasing their speed of deployment by 48%, with the average ransomware attack now executed in just 24 hours. Since January 1, 2024, more than 2,100 victims across Europe were named on extortion leak sites, underscoring the scale of compromise across the continent. The emergence of initial access brokers has fueled “Big Game Hunting” operations targeting large enterprises, with 260 such brokers marketing access to over 1,400 European organizations.
Certain countries have experienced emerging or accelerating threats from nation-state actors targeting critical sectors for geopolitical purposes. Evidence suggests that Russia directs ransomware operators to target sectors like healthcare, energy, and food supply chains, aligning these attacks with strategic geopolitical objectives. Russian-affiliated actors continued to focus on Ukraine, utilizing credential phishing and destructive activities aimed at government, military, energy, telecom, and utilities sectors. China-based threat actor groups have dramatically increased their activities, with certain targeted industries suffering 200% to 300% surges in attacks compared to the previous year. Chinese state-sponsored adversaries have targeted industries in 11 European countries, exploiting cloud infrastructure and software supply chains to steal intellectual property, with persistent campaigns especially in healthcare and biotechnology.
Technological Vulnerabilities Creating Risk
Organizations face ransomware risk significantly shaped by technical vulnerabilities and security weaknesses in their IT environments. Exploited vulnerabilities continue as the predominant technical root cause of ransomware attacks, with 32% of ransomware incidents attributed to attackers leveraging unpatched or unknown vulnerabilities within organizational IT environments. This trend has persisted for the third consecutive year, underscoring the persistent challenge organizations face in maintaining robust vulnerability management and patching regimes, even as threat actors refine their tactics. Any internet-facing system with out-of-date software or hardware is vulnerable to attack, as are web applications and third-party dependencies that may not receive timely security updates. Ransomware actors specifically exploit known publicly disclosed vulnerabilities, understanding that many organizations delay patching and remain vulnerable to attacks exploiting weaknesses already well-documented in public vulnerability databases.
Compromised credentials remain the second most common attack vector, though their share has decreased from 29% in 2024 to 23% in 2025. Credential compromise occurs through multiple mechanisms including credential stuffing, purchasing credentials off the dark web, spear phishing, watering hole attacks, and keystroke loggers. Organizations with weak credential management practices, absence of multi-factor authentication, or limited monitoring of credential usage patterns create environments where stolen credentials enable relatively easy network access. Email-based threats including malicious attachments and phishing have experienced a notable uptick, now accounting for 37% of initial access vectors, a significant increase from the previous year. Phishing continues as the most popular attack vector for malware deployment, with attackers lacing legitimate-looking emails with malicious links and attachments to trick users into unwittingly installing malware.
Legacy systems represent a particularly acute vulnerability category, with outdated software solutions inherently more vulnerable than modern, cloud-based platforms. Legacy software solutions often cannot support multi-factor authentication, a critical defense against phishing attacks and credential theft. Without MFA, a single compromised password can grant cybercriminals unrestricted access to municipal databases, financial systems, and citizen records. Older applications frequently rely on outdated encryption protocols such as SHA-1 and TLS 1.0, which are vulnerable to modern decryption techniques, whereas modern standards like AES-256 and TLS 1.3 provide significantly stronger data protection. Many legacy systems lack vendor support, meaning they do not receive critical security patches needed to fix vulnerabilities, leaving organizations non-compliant with modern regulatory requirements and exposed to cyber threats. Another significant weakness of legacy software involves vulnerability to ransomware attacks due to outdated backup methods, as traditional backups can easily be encrypted or deleted by ransomware, making data recovery difficult or impossible.
Remote work and distributed workforces have created expanded attack surfaces that ransomware operators actively exploit. Remote workers often operate from unsecured home networks, use personal devices on company networks, rely on less robust corporate email filtering, and lack direct IT support or peer validation when they encounter suspicious communications. Corporate email systems typically employ advanced filtering technologies to detect and block phishing emails, spam, and malicious attachments before they reach the inbox, but remote workers accessing work email through personal devices or external clients outside the corporate environment often bypass these protective layers. Remote environments lack robust defenses compared to controlled office networks, with endpoints operating beyond the core network potentially lacking proper monitoring and security controls. Employees who connect via personal Wi-Fi or unsecured public networks can inadvertently become conduits for malware, especially if their systems are not patched regularly.
Human Factors and Social Engineering Vulnerabilities
While technical vulnerabilities enable ransomware deployment, human factors and organizational weaknesses frequently create the initial access opportunities that attackers exploit. Studies reveal that human mistakes account for 82% of data breaches, and ransomware is no exception to this pattern. Understanding the human vulnerabilities that create ransomware risk requires examining both individual employee susceptibility and organizational shortcomings in training and awareness. Phishing emails represent one of the most common entry points for ransomware, as cybercriminals send seemingly legitimate emails to employees, tricking them into clicking malicious links or downloading infected attachments. A single click can provide attackers with access to corporate systems, and many organizations report that 80% or more of security breaches have originated with phishing attempts. The ease with which phishing can succeed reflects the sophistication of modern social engineering approaches, with attackers using contextually appropriate deceptions that exploit employee psychology and organizational relationships.
Beyond phishing emails, social engineering tactics include phone scams, fake websites, and impersonation attempts, with lack of employee awareness about these schemes leading to inadvertent information sharing or system compromise. Vendor impersonation attacks, where attackers pose as legitimate suppliers to request changes in payment details or deliver fake invoices, have proven particularly effective in industries with complex supply chains and frequent subcontractor interactions. Executive impersonation attacks, sometimes called CEO fraud, involve criminals spoofing senior management to pressure employees into transferring funds or divulging confidential information. Attackers have increasingly used phishing campaigns targeting employees of third-party vendors, stealing credentials and gaining initial access to larger organizations through trusted vendor relationships. In one high-profile example, the Change Healthcare cyberattack in 2024 was attributed to human risk when a low-level employee’s credentials were compromised through a phishing email, allowing attackers to gain access without multifactor authentication and subsequently exfiltrate sensitive data and deploy ransomware, with response costs estimated between $2.3 and $2.45 billion dollars.
The effectiveness of phishing attacks has increased with the adoption of artificial intelligence by threat actors, who now use generative AI to craft contextually appropriate phishing emails and social engineering tactics that bypass traditional security awareness training. AI-enhanced social engineering poses particular challenges because attackers use generative AI to create deepfakes, spread misinformation, and easily write malicious code. Part-time job scams have evolved from text-based interactions to more sophisticated AI-generated voice communications, adding new layers of realism that make schemes increasingly difficult for unsuspecting victims to identify. Gen’s telemetry data revealed a 24% quarter-over-quarter increase in consumer-targeted ransomware attacks during Q2 2024, with India experiencing a staggering 379% increase, followed by significant spikes in the US, Canada, and the United Kingdom. The rise in consumer-targeted attacks suggests that individual users lacking organizational security infrastructure face increasing vulnerability to ransomware compromise.
Organizational failures in cybersecurity awareness and training create environments where phishing and social engineering succeed at high rates. A comprehensive 26% of global organizations provide no security awareness training for employees, with smaller companies particularly lagging behind in training provision. Among businesses with 1 to 50 employees, nearly 30% do not offer any form of IT security awareness training. Even organizations providing security training often find those programs inadequate, with nearly 40% of respondents believing their security awareness programs are not keeping up with evolving social engineering threats, particularly concerning the capabilities required to combat AI-powered cyber attacks. This significant gap in cybersecurity education indicates that organizations are not adequately preparing employees to recognize and respond to sophisticated modern threats.
Despite extensive research and industry emphasis on security awareness training, the effectiveness of mandatory training in reducing phishing susceptibility remains questionable. Recent studies reveal that common cybersecurity training methods do not significantly reduce people’s likelihood of falling for phishing attacks and may in some cases actually make people more susceptible. A University of Chicago and University of California, San Diego study found “no evidence that annual security awareness training correlates with reduced phishing failures,” with researchers expecting better performance from people who had recently completed training but finding no significant connection between training recency and phishing test performance. Embedded training lessons assigned to people who fail phishing tests exclude others who might be susceptible to future attacks, creating an inefficient approach that the researchers conclude “implicitly assumes that users who do not fall for one phishing lure do not need training to protect against future attacks,” which their evidence clearly contradicts. The Harvard researchers similarly found that mandatory training “did not have a substantial impact on click rates,” with “offenders remained more likely to click on phishing simulation” even after receiving remedial training.
Organizational and Operational Weaknesses
Beyond specific technical or human vulnerabilities, organizational and operational shortcomings create environments where ransomware attacks succeed at disproportionately high rates. A lack of cybersecurity expertise was cited by 40.2% of respondents as a key factor contributing to successful ransomware intrusions, closely followed by unrecognized security gaps (40.1%) and insufficient personnel or monitoring capacity (39.4%). These findings suggest that many organizations lack both the resources and the capabilities to detect and respond to sophisticated attacks in timely manner. Organizations struggling with resource constraints find it increasingly difficult to maintain the continuous monitoring, threat hunting, and incident response capabilities necessary to detect ransomware operations before they reach the encryption and extortion stages. Interestingly, the operational root causes of ransomware incidents vary significantly by organization size and sector, with smaller organizations disproportionately affected by specific vulnerabilities while larger entities face different risk profiles.
Organizations often demonstrate a dangerous disconnect between perceived ransomware preparedness and actual vulnerability. Research from CrowdStrike’s State of Ransomware Survey revealed that while half of surveyed global security leaders believed they were “very well prepared” for ransomware, 78% of their organizations were attacked in the past year, with fewer than 25% recovering within 24 hours and nearly a quarter suffering major disruption or data loss. This “confidence illusion” reflects the gap between how ready organizations think they are and how quickly modern adversaries can prove otherwise. Only 38% of organizations addressed the specific security issue that allowed attackers to enter their systems, signifying a lack of urgency to prepare for future attacks. This pattern suggests that organizations that survive ransomware attacks often treat the incident as an isolated event rather than as evidence of persistent vulnerabilities requiring systematic remediation.
Organizations relying heavily on third-party vendors and service providers face amplified ransomware risk because compromise of a critical vendor can grant attackers access to all that vendor’s clients simultaneously. A 43% surge in incidents shows that threat actors have deliberately targeted larger organizations through their smaller business partners, with cybercriminals recognizing that SMBs often serve as entry points to larger enterprises through trusted business relationships. Managed Service Providers represent particularly attractive targets for attackers because they often have privileged access to multiple client networks, making a breach of an MSP potentially catastrophic for all their clients. The contamination of software supply chains—through compromised software updates, compromised APIs, vulnerable MSPs, insider threats within vendors, and compromised hardware components—represents an increasingly common attack vector that enables attacker access to downstream organizations. By targeting the weakest links in supply chains, ransomware operators can reach dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of downstream organizations with single coordinated attacks.
Specific Victim Characteristics Increasing Susceptibility
Beyond industry and size, certain organizational characteristics increase ransomware susceptibility. Organizations with publicly accessible systems that are difficult to maintain in a secured state face higher compromise rates, particularly those operating internet-facing infrastructure without adequate hardening. Organizations that have previously not experienced ransomware attacks sometimes operate under a false sense of security, with many SMBs failing to prioritize ransomware defense because they believe their historical lack of incident means future safety. This misrepresents the true risk of ransomware attacks, which can arise with speed and severity even for organizations that have never previously experienced compromise. Organizations in industries characterized by rapid business pace and time-sensitive transactions—including real estate, hospitality, and emergency services—face additional pressure to pay ransoms because operational downtime directly translates to lost business and missed opportunities.
Organizations with inadequate backup and disaster recovery capabilities face substantially higher pressure to pay ransoms because they lack alternative options for data recovery. Research indicates that nearly 40% of respondents could not fully restore data from backups after ransomware incidents, and even organizations that successfully restore from backups face reputational damage and competitive risks from stolen data that attackers retain for future exploitation. While 97% of organizations that suffered data encryption were able to recover their data, reliance on backups has dropped to a six-year low, with only 54% using this method. This suggests that many organizations lack sufficient backup infrastructure or confidence in their backup systems to rely on them as their primary recovery method.
Organizations that have previously paid ransoms face particularly high vulnerability to repeat attacks, with 83% of paying victims experiencing repeat attacks and 93% discovering that data was stolen despite payment. This pattern reflects both the professionalization of ransomware operations and the rational economic incentive for attackers to target organizations they know have previously paid, understanding that such organizations likely have the financial capacity and institutional willingness to pay again. When organizations choose to pay ransoms to resolve incidents, 69% subsequently experience additional attacks, indicating that ransom payment may signal to attackers that a particular organization is a productive target.
From Risk to Resilience: Your Ransomware Action Plan
The analysis of ransomware risk reveals that vulnerability exists across organizational types, industries, sizes, and geographies, with certain categories facing disproportionate targeting that reflects attacker incentive structures and organizational characteristics. Critical infrastructure sectors including healthcare, energy, manufacturing, government, and transportation face relentless targeting because compromise of these sectors creates cascading disruptions affecting national security and public safety. Business sectors including finance, legal services, hospitality, real estate, and media experience intense targeting because they either hold valuable data or can afford substantial ransom payments. Small and medium-sized businesses face rapidly increasing targeting because ransomware operators have shifted focus toward less-defended organizations as larger enterprises have strengthened their defenses. The most vulnerable organizations typically combine multiple risk characteristics: legacy IT systems lacking contemporary security controls; limited cybersecurity expertise and resources; employees lacking adequate security awareness training; inadequate backup and disaster recovery capabilities; reliance on vulnerable third-party vendors; and organizational cultures that prioritize operational continuity over security resilience.
The most effective mitigation strategies must address both technical vulnerabilities and organizational weaknesses while recognizing that perfect security is impossible and that resilience—the ability to detect, respond to, and recover from attacks—represents an achievable goal. Organizations should prioritize implementation of multi-factor authentication, regular software patching, employee security awareness programs informed by behavioral science rather than traditional training models, network segmentation based on least privilege principles, comprehensive backup systems with immutable storage, and vendor risk management frameworks. Governments and critical infrastructure operators must view ransomware defense as a matter of national security requiring coordinated public-private intelligence sharing, sector-specific resilience standards, and international cooperation to dismantle cross-border infrastructure enabling attacks. Ultimately, addressing the ransomware crisis requires understanding that nearly all organizations face material risk, and that preparing for compromise represents a more realistic defensive strategy than attempting to achieve prevention in an evolving threat environment.
