Ransomware Has Reached a “New Normal”: What Steady Attack Volumes Into 2026 Actually Mean

April 2026

For most of 2024 and 2025, security teams hoped that the surge in ransomware activity would plateau and decline. New data from GuidePoint Security’s Q1 2026 threat report confirms it has not. Ransomware attack volumes in the first quarter of 2026 remained steady relative to both Q4 2025 and Q1 2025, establishing what analysts are now calling the “new normal” — a sustained, elevated baseline that has effectively reset expectations for acceptable risk.

This matters because the policy implications are different from a temporary spike. Organisations that planned their security posture around a “ransomware peak” they expected to pass are now operating against a permanent high-threat environment. The question is not whether ransomware will subside. It will not. The question is whether your organisation is built to operate resilience against that baseline indefinitely.

The Threat Landscape Is Reshaping Itself

The group landscape driving this baseline is changing rapidly. The group known as The Gentlemen, which first appeared in mid-2025, expanded from 35 victims in Q4 2025 to 182 in Q1 2026 alone — making it the second most active ransomware group globally in just one quarter. This pattern of rapid growth, analysts note, almost certainly reflects experienced affiliates and operators operating under a new brand rather than a genuinely new entrant.

Established groups are also shifting behaviour. Qilin, which dominated 2025 attack volumes, saw activity decline by 25% in Q1 2026 — but remains the most prolific by victim count. Akira, known for financially focused operations, saw a 22% decline. This redistribution of activity across groups makes attribution harder and creates detection challenges for organisations whose threat intelligence is calibrated to specific known groups.

The Most Important Tactical Shift: Encryption Is Optional Now

Perhaps the most operationally significant change is that traditional encryption-based ransomware is giving way to data theft and extortion-only operations. In this model, attackers exfiltrate sensitive data but do not encrypt files. The leverage is the threat of public release or sale of that data — not the disruption of operations.

This shift reduces operational complexity for attackers significantly. It also eliminates the primary defence that many organisations believe protects them: offline backups. If your data has been stolen and the attacker threatens to publish it, having a clean backup copy does not remove the leverage. The breach has already occurred.

For organisations in sectors handling sensitive client data — healthcare, banking, legal, manufacturing with trade secrets, or any business with DPDP obligations — extortion-only ransomware is a direct regulatory risk, not just an operational one.

What "Built for Resilience" Actually Looks Like

Accepting ransomware as a permanent baseline means security posture needs to shift from “prevent every attack” — which is not achievable — to “detect fast, contain fast, and limit damage.”

  • Mean time to detect matters more than ever. Industry data consistently shows that attackers who have undetected access for more than a few days cause exponentially more damage. The objective is to collapse the dwell time — the window between initial intrusion and detection — to hours, not weeks.
  • Lateral movement detection is critical. Ransomware attacks rarely encrypt files the moment they gain access. They spend days or weeks moving through the network, escalating privileges, identifying valuable targets, and disabling backup systems. This activity generates detectable log signals if someone is watching.
  • Incident response playbooks must be pre-built. The first 15–30 minutes of a confirmed ransomware incident are the most consequential. Organisations without documented playbooks lose time to confusion, which translates directly into scope of damage.
  • Tabletop exercises matter. A response plan that has never been tested is a plan that will fail under pressure. Simulating a ransomware incident with the actual people who would respond — not just the IT team, but legal, finance, communications, and leadership — reveals gaps that documentation never catches.

The broader signal from GuidePoint’s Q1 2026 data is straightforward: elevated ransomware is now the floor, not the ceiling. Organizations that are not actively monitoring for the early indicators of an attack in progress are operating on borrowed time.