Ransomware gangs skip the CEO, head straight for the 40-something IT manager

Turns out the fastest way to get a company to consider paying a ransom isn’t calling the CEO – it’s targeting the 46-year-old IT manager. That’s according to Zscaler, whose ThreatLabz researchers tracked 351 victims across 334 organizations caught up in Read More …

Toy Ghouls’ new toy: the GenieLocker ransomware

The new GenieLocker ransomware family has been active since March 2026. It has been used in attacks against organizations in the Russian Federation, primarily in the manufacturing sector, and attributed to the Toy Ghouls group by open-source intelligence (link in Russian). The Read More …

Colombian energy giant Ecopetrol says thousands of user accounts hit in cyberattack

Latin American energy producer Ecopetrol has revealed it was victim of a ransomware attack, and while the threat actors managed to get away with sensitive data from thousands of user accounts, they were unable to deploy the encryptor and thus Read More …

Coca-Cola suspended production at its Fairlife dairy after a ransomware attack

U.S. beverage maker Coca-Cola said one of its dairy subsidiaries was hacked and that it’s shutting down its operations for the foreseeable future. The multinational giant said in a disclosure with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that its Fairlife dairy company Read More …

No Manners Here: The Ruthless Rise of The Gentlemen Ransomware

The Gentlemen (aka Storm-2697) is a Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) program active since at least July 2025. Public reporting indicates that the operators were likely active months earlier as an affiliate (known as ArmCorp) of Qilin RaaS, which Unit 42 tracks as Read More …

Florida ransomware negotiator convicted for helping ransomware gang extort US companies

Florida man Angelo Martino has been sentenced to more than five years in prison for conspiring with hackers to deploy ransomware during his job as a ransomware negotiator for a U.S. cybersecurity company. The U.S. Department of Justice confirmed the sentence on Read More …

An unnamed US county paid $1M extortion demand to cybercriminals

A US county reportedly paid $1 million to Kairos, an extortion gang that claimed to have stolen more than 2 TB of data, but the county never received independently verifiable proof that the stolen files had been deleted – just Read More …

Self-destructing Mistic backdoor linked to access broker selling corporate footholds to ransomware gangs

A new self-destructing backdoor called Mistic used in intrusions since April appears to be linked to a criminal gang that compromises corporate networks and then sells that access to ransomware groups, according to security researchers. This backdoor, also tracked as Read More …

CISA gives US federal agencies three days to fix a VPN bug under attack by a ransomware gang

A ransomware group is actively exploiting an unpatched flaw in security tools used across the U.S. federal government, prompting the U.S. cybersecurity agency CISA to order all civilian agencies to remediate the vulnerability by end of day Wednesday. Cybersecurity firm Check Point Read More …