Security leaders have fought to keep pace with rapidly evolving ransomware tactics for decades, and 2024 served as yet another reminder of the dynamic and persistent nature of the ransomware threat. Attacks are more personalized, sophisticated, and difficult to defend against.
Last year, ransomware groups made headlines for their ruthlessness, even going as far as targeting the children of corporate executives to force ransom payments. High-profile law enforcement actions like Operation Endgame and Operation Duck Hunt led to significant takedowns of major initial access brokers and ransomware families, yet many have proven resilient, able to quickly regroup and launch new attacks.The Zscaler ThreatLabz research team continues to track ransomware activity to provide insights into how these threats are evolving. The latest ThreatLabz Ransomware Report offers deep analysis of 4.4 million ransomware attacks blocked by the Zscaler cloud (a 17.8% year-over-year increase). The report provides valuable insights into primary attack targets as well as ransomware actors’ evolving tactics and demands—including a record-breaking US$75 million ransom payment uncovered by ThreatLabz in 2024.
Based on extensive research and analysis, ThreatLabz has made the following predictions on ransomware trends for 2025—a year in which ransomware will remain a top concern for organizations worldwide.
Top ransomware predictions for 2025Prediction 1: AI-powered social engineering attacks will surge and fuel ransomware campaignsIn 2025, threat actors will increasingly use generative AI (GenAI) to conduct more effective social engineering attacks. A top emerging AI-driven trend is voice phishing (vishing). With the proliferation of GenAI-based tooling, initial access broker groups will increasingly leverage AI-generated voices that sound shockingly realistic, even adopting local accents and dialects to deceive victims.
These attacks will aim to trick employees into granting access to corporate environments in order to exfiltrate data and deploy ransomware. Ransomware attacks will become both more convincing and difficult to detect, underscoring the need for AI-powered zero trust security measures.
Prediction 2: Ransomware threat actors will adopt highly targeted attack strategiesSophisticated ransomware groups will shift away from large-scale, indiscriminate attacks and instead focus on low-volume, high-impact campaigns in 2025. These calculated
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