What is Ransomware? 

The Initial Access Phase

Attackers can use a variety of techniques to get a foothold, including:

• Phishing: Credential-stealing emails, malicious attachments, and fake login pages are often targeted at HR, finance, or IT employees who have unique access.
• RDP and exposed services: Unpatched or misconfigured remote desktops, VPNs, and apps are scanned and brute-forced by attackers.
• Supply-chain attacks: Compromise of a vendor, software update, or managed service gives attackers broad downstream access.
• Third-party and vendor access risks: Persistent or over-privileged vendor accounts create openings for attackers; unmanaged credentials and long-lived VPNs increase risk. 

The Expand Phase

Once attackers have gained a foothold, they will quickly seek methods to expand their access and privileges across the network, such as:

• Privilege escalation: Exploiting vulnerable services, hunting for misconfigurations, and using exploits to move from a low-privilege user to an administrator.
• Credential harvesting and reuse: Dumping credentials from a server or workstation’s memory, extracting hashes, stealing tokens from domain controls, or harvesting saved passwords from browsers and password managers.
• Token and ticket attacks: Using Pass-the-Hash (passing the user or service account’s password hash), Pass-the-Ticket (a forged version of the account’s Domain-authenticated ticket), and Golden Ticket (impersonating the Domain Controller’s authentication mechanism) attacks to pretend to act as high-privilege accounts and expand access or read data.
• Lateral movement: Using native network management protocols and techniques to move to new hosts without triggering traditional security tools.
• Living-off-the-land: Leveraging native tools to avoid detection and mimic legitimate network activity.
• Command-and-control tools: Deploying open source frameworks such as Cobalt Strike or Sliver to maintain stealth and navigate around a network.

The Exfiltration and Encryption Phase

Once they’ve gained privileged access and expanded their reach, attackers then exfiltrate data. Data is compressed, staged, and moved via encrypted tunnels, cloud uploads, or covert channels before encryption tools are executed across target systems to disrupt operations. 

The Extortion and Post-Encryption Phase

After encryption, attackers send communications to demand payment for decryption keys and to avoid public disclosure. 

Attackers can also choose to:

• Host data auctions to release data to leak sites.
• Threaten reputational damage and doxxing, in which targeted leaks of sensitive customer or employee data are used to force faster and increased payments.
• Execute follow-on extortion against former victims or their partners.

Today’s ransomware attacks are increasingly sophisticated, human-operated, multi-staged, and tailored events. They blend technical exploits with social engineering, relying on speed, stealth, and access to third parties to evade defenses.

Average Ransom Demands by Industry

• Healthcare: $3.49 million
• Government: $1.58 million

Downtime Costs and Recovery Timeframes

The average downtime following a ransomware attack is approximately 21 days, resulting in an average cost of $14,000 per minute.

Impact on Reputation and Customer Trust

In addition to the direct bottom-line impact of having to pay ransoms, replace equipment, and handle legal fees, ransomware incidents can also severely damage an organization's reputation. This loss of customer trust can lead to long-term effects that often outweigh the immediate financial costs.

Regulatory Compliance Implications

In addition to direct financial costs, industries such as healthcare and finance are subject to stringent regulations, including HIPAA, which can lead to additional violations, hefty fines, and legal consequences.

Insurance Premium Impacts

Organizations relying on cyber insurance to mitigate their risk are seeing their premiums increase significantly. Some sectors are experiencing a 10 percent or more rise in their premiums, with additional increases or the potential for revocation if an organization fails to demonstrate that security controls are in place.

Healthcare

Healthcare ransomware attacks often target highly sensitive patient electronic health records, imaging systems, and scheduling platforms. Whether to cause havoc or exact a hefty ransom, the consequences of a ransomware attack can extend beyond HIPAA violations to include delayed treatments and patient safety risks. 

Manufacturing 

In manufacturing ransomware scenarios, attackers target production lines, SCADA systems, and safety equipment, which can result in millions of dollars in losses and endanger workers. Manufacturing plants often run legacy systems incompatible with modern security controls, further increasing the risk and amplifying exposure.

Education

Schools and universities also hold sensitive student data and valuable intellectual property related to research. However, tight budgets often put cybersecurity at the bottom of the priority list, which makes schools vulnerable to opportunistic ransomware campaigns that exploit outdated defenses and weak identity controls.

Financial Services

Ransomware in the financial services sector targets customer data and transaction records, leading to costly compliance violations and eroded customer trust.

Government and Critical Infrastructure

Ransomware targeting government agencies or utilities can disrupt essential services, including energy grids and municipal services. Legacy systems and limited resources can raise the risk of a ransomware attack and the potential payoff for a successful campaign.

A multi-layered defense involves the following key actions:

Enabling Identity-First Access

• Multi-factor authentication (MFA): Require MFA for all users, especially administrators with broad system access and capabilities and third-party vendors with access to dedicated elements of your digital assets.
• Just-in-time privileges: Grant elevated access to users only when needed, and automatically revoke it afterward.
• Least-privilege policies: Utilize “default-deny access” to control unauthorized access to sensitive systems and data, enabling access only to what is required to perform one’s job.

Implementing Network and System Controls

• Segment and create an overlay for critical assets: Utilize network segmentation and application chambers to safeguard your digital crown jewels, including critical applications, databases, and sensitive systems that form the core of your operations. This segmentation also helps prevent lateral movement without the need to re-IP your network or implement complex and difficult-to-manage firewall rules.
• Brokered third-party sessions: If third-party users are part of your operations, ensure that your organization uses time-boxed, audited access that is specific to the systems they need to perform their work.
• Egress policy enforcement: Threat actors often seek exfiltration paths that differ from their initial attack vector. Ensure that your access rules and network routes restrict unauthorized outbound paths that could be used for data exfiltration.

Conducting Employee Training and Building Awareness

Employees remain the most common entry point. Continuous education on phishing, social engineering, and safe use of privileged credentials can reduce the likelihood of initial compromise that provides the basis for a ransomware attack. Use regular drills and simulated attacks to reinforce learning and evaluate the effectiveness of your training programs.

Following Patch Management Best Practices

Timely patching of operating systems, applications, and connected devices closes the commonly exploited vectors that threat actors use to compromise systems. These widely known and disclosed vulnerabilities provide attackers with a path forward, so prioritizing the development of a patch management process, especially for critical systems, is crucial to ensure there are no gaps.

Building a Robust Backup Strategy

A robust backup strategy is often the difference between a timely recovery and a catastrophe. 

Use the 3-2-1 rule to ensure your organization’s resilience, even if attackers reach core systems:

• 3 copies of data
• 2 different media types (e.g., disk, cloud)
• 1 offsite copy

Just as crucial as creating backups is regularly testing their integrity and availability, as many organizations discover too late that their backups are corrupted, incomplete, or too slow to meet business needs. 

Ensuring Network Hygiene

Strong network “hygiene” prevents attackers from finding easy footholds. This means more than routine patching, including:

• Removing unused accounts and services
• Disabling unnecessary protocols and ports
• Monitoring for unusual traffic, anomalous patterns, or unauthorized activity
• Ensuring default credentials are never left in place

Having strong network hygiene won’t stop attackers, but it will remove easy opportunities for them to expand their attack and make it easier for your organization to spot them early.

Implementing Zero Trust Architecture

A Zero Trust Architecture (ZTA) shifts the security perspective to one that assumes compromise and requires every request—whether from a device, user, or application—to be verified. This approach, when used in combination with access controls, segmentation, and other best practices, can limit the impact of a breach, stop lateral movement, and blunt a potential ransomware attack.

When implemented, a ZTA delivers:

Application Chambers 

Application chambers isolate applications and databases, providing real-time protection enforced with granular access policies. This means that even if an account is compromised, ransomware cannot spread from one service or application to another, turning a potential attack into a contained event.

Microsegmentation 

Microsegmentation enhances ransomware protection by blocking lateral movement at the network level, thereby limiting attackers’ ability to escalate and expand their reach. By creating digital zones around workloads and databases, enabled with network devices and segmentation rules, organizations can shield critical assets even if initial entry points are compromised. 

Identity-First Security

Zero-trust ransomware defense hinges on identity, utilizing tools to provide continuous verification. This means that trust is reassessed and validated at every interaction, blocking anomalies such as unusual login attempts or attempts from unauthorized sources.

Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS)

RaaS platforms allow less sophisticated attackers to “rent” ransomware tools from more advanced developers, which lowers the technical barrier to launching a highly targeted attack. RaaS has contributed to a dramatic increase in both volume and geographic reach of attacks.

AI-Powered Attacks

Just as AI and machine learning are altering nearly every facet of our personal and professional lives, these technologies are increasingly helping attackers identify vulnerable systems, automate phishing campaigns and initial access attempts, and evade traditional detection. 

Cloud-Targeted Campaigns

The shift to Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) models is making it more complex for organizations to protect their critical assets. These services not only expand the attack surface to include more network touchpoints but also introduce more third-party access points.

IoT and OT-Focused Threats

Industrial controllers, smart devices, and connected machinery help accelerate productivity and visibility into operations. However, these technologies often lack robust security and are difficult to patch. Attacks against these targets not only introduce new attack vectors but also bring immediate operational and safety consequences for organizations that use them, further increasing the risks if exploited.

Quantum Computing Implications

Quantum computing is a double-edged sword; it threatens to break today’s complex encryption algorithms and empower future ransomware campaigns while also fueling the development of quantum-safe defenses. For attackers, this opens the door to a “steal now, decrypt later” approach that makes even encrypted data a target. 

A structured approach to evaluating options can help decision makers balance security needs with usability and long-term value.

Evaluation Criteria

• Breadth of coverage: Does the solution protect IT and OT environments, as well as cloud and hybrid assets?
• Detection and response speed: Can the system identify threats faster than human teams, ideally in real time?
• Integration: Will the solution work with existing security operations, logging, and compliance systems?
• Deployment complexity: What time and resources are required to deploy, manage, and maintain the solution?
• Legacy system compatibility: How well does the system protect both new and legacy systems without forcing expensive refreshes?
• Recovery time objectives: What tools are available to ensure data integrity and enable system restoration?

Traditional vs. Zero Trust Approaches

Traditional security models emphasize perimeter defenses and end-user awareness training. Although these efforts are valuable, they can leave the interior of a network susceptible to fast-moving threats once they gain an initial foothold. Zero Trust approaches, on the other hand, assume a breach will occur and enforce least-privilege access to critical digital assets with every interaction—both user- and system-initiated. 

The Zero Trust model reduces the attack surface and slows lateral movement, which are two key elements that fuel ransomware attacks.

ROI Considerations

Like other IT investments, it is easy to view ransomware protection as another cost center. However, a business case for ransomware protection should accurately reflect the avoided costs of remediation and other losses. These include:

• Lost revenue from operational downtime
• Regulatory and compliance fines
• Legal liabilities
• Reputational damage

When these recovery costs are considered, the right ransomware protection solution can pay for itself many times over by preventing a single incident.

Leveraging a Vendor Selection Framework

Ready to take the next step and identify the right ransomware protection solution?

A vendor selection framework can help organize your organization’s various requirements and needs, aligning them with the available solutions. To start, organizations should build a selection framework with the following elements as a foundation:

• Mapping the ransomware protection solution features against core needs, including prevention, detection, containment, and recovery
• Evaluating proof-of-concept deployments to validate features, compatibility, and scalability
• Assessing vendor stability, roadmap, and customer support
• Prioritizing vendors that deliver layered defenses with minimal complexity

Zentera’s CoIP Platform

Zentera’s CoIP Platform is designed to address these challenges by overlaying Zero Trust security controls into existing IT and OT environments, all without requiring organizations to rip-and-replace legacy systems. 

Zentera’s CoIP Platform ensures scalable segmentation, precise vendor and user access controls, and built-in containment of ransomware, all while simplifying deployment across complex infrastructures.

Learn more about the CoIP Platform here.