Ransomware Trends in 2025

This piece surveys ransomware trends heading into 2025: payments dipped in 2024 (per Chainalysis) as victim payment rates fall, average ransoms hover just over $500K (median under $250K), and full data recovery after payment is increasingly rare. Threat actors continue to favor social engineering while escalating exploitation of software/firmware vulnerabilities, shift further into double extortion and data-theft-only models, and fragment under law-enforcement pressure with a rise of lone operators and nation-state involvement; AI-enabled agentic ransomware is anticipated, and the article urges use of CISA’s KEV for patching and robust recovery planning.