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Last year, ransomware crews launched about 50
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% more attacks and made 8 % less money. The locks
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stopped paying, so they stopped using it. In
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2026, 94 % of ransomware cases involved stealing
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your data and only 68 % even bothered to encrypt
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it. Welcome to the exfiltration era where your
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backups don't save you because the threat was
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never about locking your files. This is tech
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updates. Here's the shift in one sentence. For
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a decade, ransomware meant your files got encrypted
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and you paid for the key. Now the crews increasingly
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skip the encryption entirely. They just steal
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everything and threaten to leak it. Coveware,
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which handles thousands of these cases, says
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data theft is now the default and encryption
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is optional. Why drop the encryption? It's faster.
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It's quieter. No noisy crypto routine to trip
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your EDR. There's no decrypter to build and maintain,
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and crucially, a clean backup is useless when
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the threat is publication, not lockout. You can
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restore your servers. You can't unleash your
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customer data. One stat before we move on. Crypto
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payments to ransomware crews fell to roughly
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$820 million last year, down about 8%, even as
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a tax hit a record high. Read that again. More
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attacks, less money. The share of victims who
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pay has crashed to record lows. And here's a
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teaching moment because the exact number depends
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on who's counting. Chainalysis says about 28
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percent. Coveware says closer to 20. Sophos,
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surveying companies directly, says 48. Same trend,
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different lenses. And knowing why those numbers
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disagree is half of reading a threat report like
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a pro. The point stands, paying is no longer
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the default. But here's the twist that makes
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this smarter than the average take. Exfiltration
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only is the dominant tactic, and it is not a
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guaranteed payday. When crews mass steal data
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and demand money, victims
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are increasingly calling
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the bluff. One big exfiltration campaign saw
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an estimated 2 .5 % pay rate. Two and a half.
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So this isn't crews getting richer, it's crews
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getting cheaper and stealthier to run, while
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their leverage erodes. It's an arms race, not
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a slam dunk. The lesson. Your data being stolen
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is a disclosure event whether or not you pay.
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So plan for the leak, not just the ransom. Who's
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actually doing this in 2026? The board reshuffled
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hard. Lockbit got crippled by law enforcement
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and never recovered. The post -lockbit leader
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Ransom Hub went dark last spring and its affiliates
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scattered. Filling the vacuum, Akira and Keelin,
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each running roughly 16 % of attacks, with Klopp
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as the pure data theft specialist, mass zero
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-day campaigns, no encryptor at all. And the
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crews from our breach episode, scattered spider,
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shiny hunters, merged and launched their own
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ransomware as a service. The help desk Social
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Engineers became the platform vendors. The market
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consolidated. The top 10 groups now account for
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about 70 % of victims. And yes, AI is in the
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loop now. Anthropic disclosed a case last summer
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where a single operator used Claude Code to run
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an extortion campaign against 17 organizations.
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The AI doing reconnaissance, exploitation, and
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writing the ransom notes. One person, one AI
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tool, 17 victims. Separately, an amateur used
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AI to build working ransomware that hit 85 targets
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in his first month. AI isn't just speeding up
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the pros. It's lowering the floor so anyone can
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play. And the clock is brutal. The average time
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from a vulnerability going public to being exploited
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collapsed from about 700 days in 2020 to 44 days
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last year. Patch windows are closing. So how
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do you defend when the threat is theft, not encryption?
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Four moves. One, watch the exits. Egress monitoring
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and data loss prevention catch the actual exfiltration,
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the bulk transfer leaving your network. Backups
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won't, because backups restore files, not secrets.
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Two, segment the network. Limit how far one foothold
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can reach and how much it can grab. Three, kill
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the entry point. phishing -resistant MFA and
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passkeys, plus governance over OAuth app connections,
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because the breach wave got in through consent
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screens, not cracked passwords, and hardened
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the help desk with callback verification. 4.
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Keep immutable offline backups anyway, because
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the crews that still encrypt, like Akira and
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Killen, are very much still out there. For the
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Security Plus crowd, map this to the incident
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response lifecycle. preparation, detection and
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analysis, containment, eradication, recovery,
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lessons learned. The exfiltration era shifts
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the weight to two phases. Preparation, your DLP,
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segmentation, MFA, and an IR plan that loops
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in legal and communications because a data leak
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is a reportable breach with regulators and customers
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attached. And detection, you have to catch the
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data leaving, not just the moment files get locked.
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Memorize this line for the exam. And for real
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life, a confirmed data theft is a reportable
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breach, encrypted or not. Here's the close. The
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ransom note used to say we locked your files.
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Now it says we have your data and will tell the
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world. Backups were the answer to the old threat.
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They're necessary and no longer sufficient against
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the new one. Stop the data from leaving and you've
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taken away the only leverage they have left.
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That's the show, and that wraps our July run.
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Next week we close it out in Las Vegas. Hacker
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Summer Camp, where the whole industry's reckoning
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with AI plays out live. This is Tech Updates.
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Stay sharp.