What is Ransomware?

This report summarizes the ransomware threat landscape, explaining how modern ransomware operates across five stages (initial access, privilege escalation, lateral movement, data exfiltration, deployment), the emergence of double-extortion and RaaS models, notable families (e.g., WannaCry, Ryuk, Quantum), and practical defenses including network segmentation, immutable backups, EDR, patch management, email security, MFA, and incident response planning.