With an extortion toll running to tens of billions of dollars, few experts would dispute that ransomware is the most consequential cybercrime business model yet devised. But even the most successful business doesn’t stand still, which is why it shouldn’t surprise us that ransomware has recently started evolving in ways that signal an important shift. […]
After years of success, it looks as if the era where ransomware gangs could make easy money from data leak extortion might finally have ended. Despite its huge success, extortion-led ransomware is a surprisingly recent tactic, first becoming popular with criminals from around 2020 onwards. Its rise was driven by two trends, the first of […]
After reading recent reports of AI’s impact on cybercrime, one might assume that the world is about to enter an era of frightening, AI-powered ransomware attacks. As Trend Micro put it in its November 2025 report, The AI-Fication of Cyberthreats: “The tools, tactics, and procedures that once required coordinated human effort can now be executed […]
Between October and November 2025, one of the biggest cybercrime operations in Interpol history saw the arrest of 574 people suspected of business email compromise (BEC), digital extortion, and ransomware. Despite its scale, the operation gained almost no attention in the US and UK because it happened across 19 African countries, principally Ghana and Nigeria. […]
It’s nearly 20 years since I first encountered ransomware as the security editor of an online computer magazine, although at the time I had no idea what it was and the term had not yet been coined to describe it. A reader emailed me to describe how the main computer he used as part of […]
His name is Guan Tianfeng and in December 2024 the US State Department’s Rewards for Justice campaign placed a reward of up to $10 million for anyone offering information on his whereabouts. Guan Tianfeng, it is alleged, masterminded an April 2020 attack on Sophos XG firewalls using an exploit for a zero-day vulnerability later hastily […]
