U.S. State and Local Government Under Ransomware: 2025–2026 Trend Analysis

This 2025–2026 trend analysis details rising ransomware pressure on U.S. state and local governments—citing that ransomware appeared in 44% of breaches and 30% of public sector breaches—high recovery costs and ransom demands, common access methods (vulnerabilities, credential theft, phishing), real municipal incidents (Mission, TX and New Britain, CT), and recommended priorities for 2026 including patching, MFA, vendor oversight, protected backups, monitoring, and tested incident response to improve resilience.