Mani MasoodThe numbers should hit hard and serve as a wake up call, more than 3,600 ransomware attacks in a year, half the world’s total, and climbing fast. The 2025 ThreatLabz report did not just put the US at the top of the list, it put us on a billboard. A 146 percent jump in a single year does not happen quietly, and yet outside of the security community, the reaction feels oddly muted. Maybe it is because ransomware has been around for years. Maybe people assume it is still about one unlucky laptop getting locked. But this scale, this volume, is different. It is systemic.
Ransomware targets US organization unproportionately
While ransomware has been around for years, the way the US has become its favorite hunting ground says more about us than about them. We are not just wealthy, we are deeply connected. Our factories talk to our cloud services, our oil rigs talk to our analytics platforms, and our hospitals talk to everything from insurers to remote specialists. That interconnection makes us fast, but it also makes us fragile. Attackers are not choosing the US just because of money. They are choosing us because they know our tolerance for downtime is near zero and our attack surface is sprawling.
Walk into a manufacturing floor, a hospital server room, or a tech company’s data center and you will see the same thing, systems that cannot afford to go dark. Manufacturing alone saw over a thousand attacks last year, healthcare more than six hundred, technology close to a thousand. These sectors run on uptime. A paused assembly line bleeds revenue by the minute. A hospital without patient data is suddenly making life and death decisions blind. That urgency is oxygen to ransomware actors. They know the clock is their weapon.
The oil and gas sector’s spike is not just a statistic, it is a warning written in pipeline schematics and drilling rig control rooms. Nine hundred percent more attacks in a year is not a blip, it is a bullseye. Automation has been a gift to efficiency in this space, but many of those automated control systems sit on legacy architecture never designed for today’s threat landscape. They were built for reliability, not resilience. And when operational technology meets modern IT without airtight security in between, it is like leaving a refinery door open in the middle of the night.
How bad is the problem
Once upon a time, ransomware meant a locked screen, now it means your most sensitive data could be auctioned off to the highest bidder. The shift toward pure data theft and extortion is not cosmetic, it is psychological. Encryption could be undone with backups and patience. But when the threat is public release, the damage moves beyond downtime into reputation, compliance, and trust. Over 238 terabytes of data were stolen by the top ten ransomware groups last year. That is not just files. That is intellectual property, legal strategy, merger plans, patient histories, engineering designs.
The problem is not just that the wolves are at the door, it is that there are more of them, and they are faster than before. Thirty four new ransomware families emerged in the past year alone, bringing the total to over four hundred active groups. Some of the biggest names, RansomHub, Akira, Clop, run their operations with a speed and adaptability that many legitimate companies would envy. They rebrand, regroup, and retarget in weeks, not quarters. By the time you have patched against one variant, its cousin is already in the wild.
Overcomplicating Cybersecurity
You can feel it in meetings now, security is no longer a checklist, it is the shadow in the corner of every strategy session. Legal wants to know breach notification timelines before a single line of code is written. PR drafts “just in case” statements for launches that have nothing to do with security. And teams start to move with a kind of low level caution that eats into innovation. That is the hidden cost of constant threat. It is not just the ransom demand, it is the way it reshapes culture into something more hesitant, more defensive.
Zero trust is not just a tech fix, it is a way of running a company that assumes the fox is already inside the henhouse. It means verifying every connection, every request, every identity as if you are already under attack. It is inconvenient at first, and second slows things down. But so does cleaning up after a breach that spills into public view. Leaders who see zero trust as culture, not just architecture, will be the ones whose organizations can keep moving without constantly looking over their shoulders.
If there is a single truth in all this, it is that security cannot live in a silo, it has to be the language everyone speaks, from the shop floor to the boardroom. Ransomware is not a problem you hand off to IT. It is a business continuity issue, a brand trust issue, a leadership issue. And until it is treated as such, the US will keep its spot at the top of that unenviable list, not because the attackers are getting better, but because we are too slow to change how we think, plan, and lead in a world where the breach is not an “if” but a “when.”
From the Author
I enjoy writing about technology and cybersecurity to provide valuable insights that motivate readers to take action.
I strive to share stories like this one to inspire and inform my readers. If you enjoyed this piece, I encourage you to explore more in the Management section or Small Business section. Looking for additional insights? Don’t miss the Cybersecurity section for more expert thoughts.
To learn more about ransomware, read this Wikipedia article.
Mani
