Last Week in Ransomware: 10.30.23

This report summarizes a steep rise in ransomware activity in 2023 — reporting record public victim counts, prominent RaaS actors (LockBit, Cl0p, BlackCat), exploitation of Cisco zero-day vulnerabilities enabling privilege escalation, significant healthcare impacts affecting millions of records and lengthy downtimes, and operational trends toward data exfiltration and extortion; it highlights international policy responses and the need for improved patching, threat intelligence sharing, and defensive measures.