Cybercriminals are shifting tactics. Rather than relying solely on ransomware’s tried-and-true method of using encryption to lock files and demand payment to decrypt, many are now instead embracing exfiltration and extortion, with encryption as a secondary tactic. This marks a significant evolution in ransom-based attack methods, one where encryption is optional, but leverage is mandatory.
As backup and restoration capabilities improve, double extortion has now become the norm. In 96% of ransomware cases investigated by Arctic Wolf , the attacker also exfiltrated data to apply pressure and extort payment. These high-impact incidents often involve multiple extortion techniques: encrypting data, stealing it, and then pressuring victims with reputational threats or legal consequences.
This growing trend highlights a critical gap in many organizations’ defenses. Traditional ransomware mitigation strategies — like backups — are no longer enough. Businesses must now invest in tools and processes that prevent data theft, detect exfiltration attempts in real-time, and manage the fallout of potential public exposure.
What Is Cyber Extortion?
Cyber extortion is a digital form of blackmail where attackers threaten to damage, disclose, or block access to an organization’s systems or data unless a demand or series of demands — usually financial — is met. While it began largely with traditional ransomware, where attackers would encrypt a victim’s data and demand payment for the decryption key, extortion methods have become more advanced, coercive, and comprehensive in recent years. For cybersecurity teams, understanding this evolution is critical to implementing better defenses and responding effectively under pressure.
Single Extortion
Early ransomware campaigns such as CryptoLocker and Locky relied on a single point of leverage: encrypting endpoints or servers and demanding payment in exchange for decryption keys. With increased organizational resilience through reliable backups and offline storage, these attacks began losing efficacy.
Double Extortion
Pioneered by groups like Maze and adopted widely by ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) affiliates, double extortion models found threat actors exfiltrating sensitive data prior to encryption. This allowed threat actors to wield dual leverage: operational disruption, and reputational and other business damage. Not only could they rob organizations of their data, but they could also threaten to publicly release it. Victims could no longer rely solely on backup restoration to recover their data without risk of exposure.
Triple Extortion
This relatively recent addition to the ransomware toolkit added another pressure layer: directly targeting individual victims of data exfiltration, such as clients, vendors, or employees. In 2020, a threat actor encrypted and exfiltrated case records from patients of a Finnish psychotherapy service provider, and then individually extorted its patients — demonstrating that the financial and reputational fallout from ransomware could now extend well beyond corporate boundaries.
Quadruple Extortion
Further highlighting threat actors’ ability to innovate, recent ransomware campaigns have incorporated additional tactics such as DDoS attacks, coordinated social engineering, or public shaming via dedicated leak sites. In 2021, now-disbanded ransomware gang REvil attacked a computer hardware and electronics company, Acer, in 2021 with a quadruple extortion attack, which included a $50 million ransom demand along with threats of data leaks, client targeting, and service disruptions.
Additional Forms
Emerging, high-tech forms of cyber extortion highlight the capabilities that threat actors can deploy beyond traditional ransomware. Cyber extortion can also include tactics like:
- Sextortion, where attackers threaten to release compromising personal images or videos
- Killware, which involves threats to disrupt critical infrastructure or healthcare systems, potentially endangering lives
- Whistleblower extortion targets insiders, coercing employees to provide access or leak sensitive information under threat
- Deepfake media can be used to fabricate compromising content and demand payment for suppression
- Re-extortion involves threat actors returning to previously attacked victims with new demands
How Is Cyber Extortion Different From Ransomware?
Cyber extortion and ransomware are often used interchangeably, but they are not identical. Ransomware is a specific tactic within the broader category of cyber extortion, typically involving malicious code that encrypts a victim’s data, followed by a demand for payment in exchange for the decryption key. However, cyber extortion extends beyond encryption-based attacks to include a wider range of coercive strategies.
Both ransomware and broader extortion threats share a common goal: to pressure victims into paying by creating disruption, fear, or reputational harm. That said, cyber extortion doesn’t always involve ransomware. Some attackers skip the encryption step entirely and instead focus on stealing data, then demanding payment to prevent its exposure. Others may threaten to leak credentials, launch DDoS attacks, or engage in harassment campaigns targeting customers or employees.
In short, ransomware is one method used in cyber extortion, but not all extortion attacks rely on ransomware. As threat actor strategies evolve, organizations must evolve their protection methods to include data loss prevention, dark web monitoring, and incident response plans that account for multiple forms of coercion.
How Does Cyber Extortion Happen?
In the modern cybersecurity world of cloud environments and hybrid work, threat actors have become adept at evading security solutions by pivoting rapidly and employing multiple paths to value. But every breach begins somewhere, and for many ransomware attacks, that involves either external exposure or user error.
External Exposure
Remote services like virtual private networks (VPNs) and remote desktop protocol (RDP) enable users to connect to internal network resources from anywhere in the world with a network connection. These services are managed by remote service gateways, which handle connections and credential authentication.
Threat actors commonly target these internet-exposed applications to gain initial access in extortion attacks. By exploiting known vulnerabilities or misconfigurations, attackers can bypass normal authentication or run malicious code remotely. After gaining access, attackers move laterally within the network to prepare for ransomware deployment or data capture and exfil. Proactive patch management, exposure management, and use of tools like web application firewalls can help reduce the risk from these entry points.
User Error
Threat actors frequently leverage compromised credentials — such as usernames and passwords obtained from phishing attacks, data breaches, or dark web marketplaces — to gain initial access to target environments. Using valid credentials, attackers can bypass many perimeter defenses and access remote services like VPNs, RDP, or cloud portals with minimal detection. Once inside, they often escalate privileges, move laterally, and deploy ransomware payloads across the network.
Because this method often mimics legitimate user behavior, it’s harder to detect without strong identity and access management (IAM) controls, multi-factor authentication (MFA), and behavioral monitoring. Credential-based access remains one of the most effective techniques for ransomware operators. Other forms of user error, such as falling for other forms of social engineering, are best combatted with robust security awareness training.
Learn more about the top TTPs used by threat actors in ransomware and cyber extortion.
Who Is at Risk From Cyber Extortion?
Cyber extortion continues to occur across many sectors, but certain industries face disproportionately higher risks. Attackers prioritize organizations where downtime, data exposure, or reputational damage could lead to extreme consequences, hence would be more inclined to pay rapidly.
Healthcare
Healthcare remains the prime target for cyber extortion due to the critical nature of its services and the sensitivity of patient data. In 2024, IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach Report showed healthcare incidents incur an average breach cost exceeding $11 million (USD), the highest among all industries. Hospitals and clinics are frequently targeted because extortion-induced disruptions can directly affect patient care, incentivizing quick payment.
Education
K-12 and higher education institutions rarely have the funding and staffing required to manage the expansive requirements that come with a comprehensive cybersecurity program. Making matters even more challenging, technology and data have transformed the educational experience and the way students learn, but at the cost of increased attack surfaces and greater exposure to cyber attacks. No wonder, then, that educational institutions continue to be heavily targeted, driven by often outdated IT infrastructure and large volumes of personal information on students and staff.
Local and Regional Government
Local and regional government entities remain prime targets for cyber extortion due to their essential public services and frequently limited cybersecurity resources. The 2024 Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center (MS-ISAC) report documented a 44% rise in extortion attacks on state and local governments over 2023, with attackers frequently combining data theft and service disruption.
Manufacturing and Critical Infrastructure
In today’s modern manufacturing world, automation and connectivity are essential parts of manufacturing. But these same technical innovations expose the manufacturing industry to cyber threats, putting their people, data, intellectual property, and reputation at risk.
Manufacturers and industrial operators are targeted because disruptions can halt production lines and severely impact supply chains. IBM’s 2024 X-Force Threat Intelligence Index identified manufacturing as the most frequently targeted sector globally for ransomware and extortion attacks, comprising 28% of all incidents reported in that year. Attackers often deploy double extortion tactics — encrypting operational technology systems while threatening to expose stolen intellectual property — heightening pressure on organizations to comply.
Financial and Legal Services
Financial services firms and law firms face elevated risk due to the high value and sensitivity of the data they hold, as well as regulatory consequences tied to breaches. Competitive pressures are driving financial organizations to further expand the range of products and information services they offer, making their systems more open and accessible from a wider range of devices and locations. This combination of resource-rich targets, mission-critical systems, and accessible environments make a tempting target to cybercriminals who see financial services organizations as potentially massive paydays.
How Can Organizations Protect Themselves?
Today’s cyber extortion campaigns are no longer just a ransomware problem — they are complex, coordinated operations aimed at maximizing leverage. As a result, defending against them requires a combination of preventative, detective, and responsive controls. Proactive defense against modern cyber extortion attacks like ransomware demands a layered, threat-informed defense strategy.
Identity and Access Controls
Be it through social engineering, the purchase of stolen credentials, or even a brute-force attack, access often begins with a maliciously obtained password. In addition, credentials can be used by the threat actor to gain privileged access, creating the opportunity to deploy ransomware into critical parts of the network.
Proactive and reactive measures security teams can take to improve credential security include:
- Implementing MFA
- Conducting dark web monitoring
- Hardening directory services solutions (such as Active Directory or Azure AD)
- Embracing the principle of least privilege access (PolP), supported by a zero trust access model, role-based access control, and privileged access management (PAM)
- Delivering comprehensive user security awareness training
Read about the importance of identity and access management.
Endpoint Security
The primary goal of endpoint security is to protect endpoints from a range of cyber threats, including extortion and ransomware, and many other threats like phishing and unauthorized access. Unlike older security approaches that focused mainly on defending the network perimeter, modern endpoint security recognizes that not only has the concept of a single, hardened network perimeter faded away with the rise of cloud computing, but also that many enterprise endpoints exist beyond the protections of a traditional network perimeter.
Learn more about how to best protect your endpoints.
Ongoing Vulnerability Management
While zero-days make headlines, it’s often known, unpatched vulnerabilities that allow threat actors to gain access to a network or system. By staying on top of vulnerabilities, an organization goes a long way in hardening their attack surface. A full, risk-based vulnerability management program facilitates continuous, prioritized vulnerability remediation and assessment, with other components of the program complementing and assisting overall remediation and mitigation.
Discover how to build proper risk-based vulnerability management.
Managed Detection and Response (MDR)
Monitoring is critical for preventing attacks, especially as threat actors utilize legitimate programs, such as PowerShell and Active Directory, for malicious ends. Without proper monitoring and detection, unusual behavior in those programs would go unnoticed. In addition, swift detection and response capabilities can allow your organization to stop a ransomware threat while the threat actors try to gain initial access or before they can make lateral movement.
Incident Response
An insurance-approved incident response (IR) team provides the full suite of services needed to recover from a cyber attack like ransomware and quickly restore business operations to pre-incident conditions. A trained IR team will remove the threat actor from your environment, negotiate with threat actors, determine the root cause and extent of the attack, and restore critical systems.
Explore how full-service incident response can get you back to business faster.
In short, cyber extortion is not just about ransomware anymore. It’s about creating as much leverage as possible using every available channel: encrypted files, stolen data, customers, stakeholders, and even public pressure. By understanding the layered tactics behind the rise of cyber extortion, security teams can better anticipate how attacks unfold and prepare their defenses accordingly.
No organization is immune, but those that take proactive steps to identify critical assets, close access gaps, and develop tested response strategies will be best positioned to withstand the next wave of extortion threats.
