The cybersecurity landscape has reached a critical turning point in Q2 2025 as it is marked by a dramatic shift in ransomware tactics that challenge old defense strategies. Some of the recent findings from Coveware by Veeam share a completely new reality. The studies suggest that attackers have changed their approach fundamentally and have abandoned mass attacks for precision strikes. This strategy helps them target the human element while prioritizing data theft over system encryption at the same time. This transformation demands a corresponding evolution in how organizations protect their most valuable asset—their data.
"The second quarter of 2025 marks a turning point in ransomware, as targeted social engineering and data exfiltration have become the dominant playbook," said Bill Siegel, CEO of Coveware by Veeam. The Q2 2025 ransomware report, which is based on firsthand data from thousands of cyber extortion cases, has revealed a sophisticated threat landscape. It shows that attackers have refined their methods to minimize detection and maximize impact.
The numbers tell a compelling story of escalation. Both the average and median ransom payments rose to $1.13 million (+104% from Q1 2025) and $400,000 (+100% from Q1 2025), respectively. This rapid surge points out not just an increased attack frequency, but a fundamental change in how cybercriminals operate and their targets.
Scattered Spider, Silent Ransom, and Shiny Hunters are the three major ransomware groups that dominated Q2 2025. Every group displayed a sophisticated understanding of human psychology and organizational vulnerabilities. Apart from this, the groups had abandoned mass opportunistic attacks for precision strikes. They did this by using novel impersonation tactics against help desks, employees, and third-party service providers.
This tactical evolution represents a maturation of the ransomware ecosystem. Rather than casting wide nets, hoping to catch vulnerable systems, attackers now invest significant resources in understanding their targets. They research organizational structures, identify key personnel, and craft believable scenarios that trick employees into providing access credentials or installing malicious software.
The effectiveness of these tactics becomes clear when examining attack vectors. Credential compromise, phishing, and exploitation of remote services continue to dominate initial access, with attackers increasingly bypassing technical controls via social engineering. This shift places the human element at the center of cybersecurity concerns, requiring organizations to rethink their defensive strategies.
The rise of data theft over conventional encryption techniques is arguably the most important change in the ransomware landscape. 74% of all cases in Q2 involved exfiltration, highlighting its crucial role in contemporary extortion schemes. Data theft has changed from being only a prelude to encryption to becoming the primary event in many attacks, marking a fundamental shift in the economics of extortion. The ramifications are significant: companies are threatened not only with regard to regulatory compliance, competitive positioning, and data confidentiality, but also with regard to operational continuity.
This shift reflects the attackers' understanding that data theft often provides more reliable leverage than encryption. While robust backup strategies can mitigate the impact of encrypted systems, stolen intellectual property, customer data, or sensitive business information creates lasting vulnerabilities that extend far beyond immediate operational disruption.
The Q2 2025 data has revealed clear patterns in victimization. Professional services, healthcare, and consumer services firms are few of the most targeted sectors, while mid-sized companies with 11 to 1,000 employees account for up to 64% of victims. This targeting strategy reflects a smart and calculated approach to risk and reward employed by the attackers.
Mid-sized organizations present an optimal target profile: they typically hold valuable data and sufficient resources to pay substantial ransoms yet lack the sophisticated security infrastructure of larger enterprises. They're large enough to offer potential payouts. However, they might lack the robust cybersecurity defenses that protect bigger companies.
As the ransomware landscape evolves, Veeam Software has positioned itself at the forefront of data resilience solutions that address both traditional and emerging threats. The company's approach recognizes that effective ransomware defense requires more than backup and recovery. It demands a holistic strategy that protects data throughout its lifecycle.
With a single objective and result—data recovery from ransomware attacks—Coveware by Veeam has assisted thousands of victims of cyberextortion and created industry-leading software and services that facilitate quick forensic triage, extortion negotiation and remediation, cryptocurrency settlements, and decryption services. This special blend of data resilience technology and incident response experience offers organizations the ability to recover quickly and take preventative action.
Veeam's data resilience platform addresses the challenges revealed in the Q2 2025 report through multiple layers of protection. Veeam Data Platform enables organizations to protect their data, from backups to clean and fast recovery. Besides, Veeam also allows you to recover quickly from a ransomware attack. This capability is especially important when attackers aren't just after your backups. They're after your people, your processes, and the reputation of your data.
The platform's security features address the modern threat landscape through several key capabilities:
Immutable Backup Protection: Immutable, secure backups serve as the foundation for protection, ensuring that even if attackers gain access to production systems, backup data remains untouchable. This protection becomes particularly important given that in most cases, attackers targeted backup repositories directly to sabotage recovery.
Advanced Threat Detection: Multi-layered malware detection catches threats before, during, and after backups, helping you recover faster and stay resilient against cyberattacks. This proactive approach addresses the sophisticated nature of modern attacks that may remain dormant within systems before activation.
Secure Recovery Capabilities: Validates backups in isolated, malware-free environments using automated testing and network isolation, powered by Veeam DataLabs, SureBackup, and Secure Restore. This ensures that recovery operations don't reintroduce compromised data into cleaned environments.
Veeam has incorporated artificial intelligence into every aspect of its platform in recognition of the growing sophistication of attacks. Veeam Backup & Replication's AI improves threat detection and prevention, allowing for the early detection and mitigation of possible security risks to guarantee data integrity.
The AI capabilities of the platform go beyond conventional detection based on signatures. Our integrated, AI-powered Malware Detection Engine activates during backup and quickly identifies threats by analyzing file extensions and low-impact, inline entropy. This method assists in locating hitherto undiscovered dangers that could elude traditional security protocols.
Veeam understands that ransomware incidents need more than just technical solutions. Therefore, it offers comprehensive incident response capabilities with the help of its Cyber Secure program. Veeam Cyber Secure is an elite program that helps customers looking to enhance the security of their business. It adopts best practices for implementation and ongoing management of their backups to protect before, during and after a cyber incident.
The best thing is that this program addresses the human element which has become so critical in modern day attacks. Personalized training, including quarterly tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) analysis sessions, help organizations understand evolving threat patterns. It also helps organizations prepare their teams for social engineering attempts.
When incidents do occur, the program offers immediate support. Support and response teams are available 24/7 to ensure minimal downtime. Retained IR also offers two fully covered incident response negotiations per year. This capability becomes particularly valuable during the complex negotiation dynamics in modern ransomware incidents.
The Q2 2025 report's findings underscore that modern ransomware defense must extend beyond technical measures to encompass organizational resilience. Organizations must prioritize employee awareness, harden identity controls, and treat data exfiltration as an urgent risk, not an afterthought.
Veeam's approach recognizes this reality through solutions that address both technical and human factors. Early threat detection, SIEM integration, and proactive threat hunting, coupled with Veeam's immutability, backup verification, secure recovery capabilities create multiple layers of defense that protect against both opportunistic and targeted attacks.
The financial implications of the Q2 2025 findings cannot be ignored. With average ransom payments exceeding $1 million, the economic case for robust data resilience becomes compelling. A Ransomware Recovery Warranty covers up to $5 million USD in data recovery expenses in the unlikely event that recovery is not possible. This level of confidence in recovery capabilities reflects the maturity and reliability of Veeam's data resilience platform.
The warranty also demonstrates the importance of preparation over reaction. Organizations that invest in comprehensive data resilience strategies position themselves to weather attacks without capitulating to extortion demands, breaking the financial incentive structure that drives continued ransomware development.
Veeam's leadership in data resilience has gained recognition across the industry. Veeam has been named a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Data Resilience Solutions, Q4 2024, validating the company's approach to addressing modern cybersecurity challenges.
This recognition reflects not just technical capabilities, but the comprehensive nature of Veeam's approach to data resilience. Backup, recovery, portability, security, and intelligence. Protect your data across platforms, available whenever and wherever you need them. That's what we call data resilience.
The Q2 2025 ransomware trends indicate a fundamental change in the way cybercriminals approach their craft, not just short-term tactical changes. We do think the risk to the large enterprise market will quickly increase as groups change their attack strategies away from convenient/bulk-purchased attack vectors and invest more resources in compromising fewer high-profile entities, even though small and middle-sized businesses have historically experienced a disproportionate number of attacks during the height of the RaaS model.
Defensive tactics must adapt to this evolution. Businesses can no longer assume that backup systems offer sufficient protection or rely only on perimeter defenses. Data resilience solutions that foresee and adjust to attacker innovations are necessary in the current threat landscape.
Veeam's continued investment in threat intelligence, AI-powered detection, and comprehensive incident response capabilities positions the company to address not just current threats, but the emerging challenges that will define the next phase of cybersecurity evolution. With over half a million customers, Veeam doesn't have a technical support case on record where an organization was unable to recover data when backups were in an immutable target such as the cloud and the customer has the encryption key.
The Q2 2025 ransomware findings show a clear picture that the threat landscape has changed fundamentally, and organizations should adapt accordingly to safeguard their businesses. Especially, the rise of targeted social engineering, the prioritization of data exfiltration, and the increasing sophistication of attack methods have created new challenges that old security measures cannot tackle in an efficient way.
Veeam's comprehensive approach to data resilience provides a path forward. It combines immutable backup protection, AI-powered threat detection, secure recovery capabilities, along with expert incident response services, to address not just the technical, but also the human elements of modern cybersecurity challenges.
As ransomware continues to evolve, one truth remains constant that organizations prioritizing data resilience, investing in comprehensive protection strategies, and are preparing for both prevention and recovery will be able to safely run their businesses in a rapidly growing hostile digital environment. The cost of preparation pales in comparison to the potential impact of successful attacks, making data resilience not just a technical necessity, but a fundamental business imperative.