Key Takeaways
- Ransomware is evolving. It is growing in both scale and sophistication, making comprehensive, modern threat intelligence increasingly necessary for the prevention of ransomware attacks.
- Modern threat intelligence solutions—which use customized, contextualized, and entity-centric threat profiling to identify which threats are most likely to target your specific organization next—offer a proactive solution to these next-generation ransomware attacks.
- Proactive threat intelligence helps prevent ransomware attacks in a multitude of ways, separating signal from noise and automating detection and response by:
- Providing AI reporting that enables automatic generation of customized, audience-specific ransomware intelligence reports
- Identifying exposed credentials across the dark web and triggering automated remediation workflows
- Prioritizing and remediating the common ports and protocols targeted by ransomware actors to proactively fortify potential entry points
- Delivering an end-to-end view of your ransomware exposure across the attack lifecycle as well as guidance for each threat to identify security risks early, prioritize action, and take targeted mitigation steps.
- Integrating into existing workflows and security tools to enable efficient, intelligence-driven detection and response to ransomware threats across a variety of areas and aspects of an organization and its operations.
- To successfully integrate proactive threat intelligence into your organization’s security operations, take a three-pronged approach that focuses on people, processes, and technology.
- With the continued evolution of AI and ML, modern threat intelligence is only growing more sophisticated and capable by the day—leading to more intelligent automation, better detection of “weak signals”, reduced false positives, and more entity and organization-specific intelligence that automatically separates signal from noise for actionable insights.
Introduction: The Rise of Next-Generation Ransomware
The face of ransomware is changing. In both scale and sophistication, this long-standing feature of the threat landscape has evolved from an occasional nuisance into one of the most devastating threats facing organizations today.
Attackers and the tactics they employ have evolved dramatically. The emergence of double and triple extortion, ransomware-as-a-service, and AI-assisted campaigns have come together to both lower the barrier to entry for attackers and make modern ransomware attacks more sophisticated and impactful. This was recently evidenced in Verizon’s 2025 Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR), which found that ransomware was present in nearly half (44%) of all breaches in the past 12 months, up from just 32% the year prior. And as for the changing tactics, a recent study from Sophos revealed that exploited vulnerabilities now account for nearly a third (32%) of all ransomware incidents today, surpassing phishing for the first time as the leading technical root cause behind these attacks.
As the face of ransomware continues to change and evolve, traditional defenses, such as backups, patching, and endpoint detection, are no longer enough. Though they remain necessary, they are no longer up to the task of defending against today’s ransomware landscape on their own. Attackers move too quickly, exploit vulnerabilities too efficiently, and adapt too rapidly. To truly shift the balance, organizations must pivot from a reactive stance to a proactive one. That’s the promise of modern threat intelligence.
A Look at Best of Breed Threat Intelligence: What Sets it Apart, and Why That Matters
At its core, modern, proactive threat intelligence is about getting ahead of attacks before they materialize. By leveraging advanced analytics, AI, and ML, proactive threat intelligence works to forecast emerging threats and adversary behavior. By continuously sourcing information and analyzing patterns across the open, deep, and dark web—alongside analyst research findings and entity-centric intelligence—modern threat intelligence reveals early indicators of targeting, exploitation,, and vulnerabilities with contextual specificity to a given organization.
This proactive capability allows security teams to anticipate and prioritize risks based on likelihood and impact, enabling proactive detection, faster mitigation, and more strategic resource allocation.
Threat intelligence, has traditionally, been largely reactive. It often compiles indicators of compromise (IOCs) after an attack has already occurred, aggregating things like past attacker TTPs to help detect or respond to threats that have already emerged. To make the flip from reactive to proactive, today’s advanced threat intelligence applies machine learning, trend analysis, and adversary modeling to anticipate an attacker’s intent to target an organization and capability to carry out a successful attack, based on past behavior, which vulnerabilities are most likely to be exploited (e.g. weak points in one’s attack surface, exposed credentials, etc.), which ransomware operators are active in your industry, and what attack vectors will likely be leveraged next. This kind of intelligence can then be arranged into a customized threat map, which helps organizations prioritize their defensive efforts intelligently and effectively.
Source: RecordedFuture
Source Link: https://www.recordedfuture.com/blog/how-to-prevent-ransomware