Ransomware as a service is on the rise, making it easier than ever for less sophisticated users to deploy effective ransomware campaigns. The likelihood that your organization will be targeted in the coming year has never been higher.
Imagine coming into work one day and your company’s ERP system is no longer working. The sales department can’t take orders, and the warehouse team doesn’t have the information they need to ship existing orders. Your company has suffered a ransomware attack. With deadlines looming and no clean backups, you face a difficult decision: Pay the attackers or risk losing your mission-critical data. Even if your organization has a clean backup, it could be days or even weeks before normal operations are restored to your most critical applications.
According to Gartner, the illicit market for ransomware surpassed $800 million in 2024. A study by insurer Travelers estimates that the number of attacks increased by 15% in 2024. A new cybercrime business model called ransomware as a service (RaaS) is making it easier than ever to target ransomware victims and accelerating an already widespread problem.
Ransomware as a service enables non-technical criminals to launch sophisticated ransomware attacks, lowering the barrier to entry for cybercrime and dramatically increasing the overall threat level. Understanding how RaaS works and how to defend against it is essential for any organization seeking to stay protected.
What Is Ransomware as a Service?
Ransomware as a service is a relatively new criminal business model in which sophisticated hackers provide their software to affiliates, who then carry out attacks and split the proceeds.
To create and deploy traditional ransomware, hackers must possess a fairly high level of technical expertise. RaaS, in contrast, provides a ready-made “product” that includes everything an attacker might need, packaged in a user-friendly interface. Hosted on dark web forums or encrypted marketplaces, these kits often include dashboards, support channels, and payment processors, giving unsophisticated cybercriminals everything they need to extort money from poorly protected businesses.
By adopting a profit-sharing business model, RaaS opens the door for inexperienced hackers to get into the game, making ransomware a more prevalent and persistent threat than ever.
How Ransomware as a Service Works
The typical RaaS operation involves two parties: the software developers who create ransomware and the affiliate organizations who use that malicious software to launch attacks.
Ransomware developers build and maintain the ransomware payload, infrastructure, and command-and-control servers. These organizations possess high levels of technical expertise and have the resources to manage and maintain sophisticated systems. Affiliates, in contrast, can simply focus their energies on identifying targets, exploiting vulnerabilities, and executing attacks.
Here’s how a RaaS attack unfolds:
- Subscription: The affiliate subscribes to a RaaS platform, often for a monthly fee or a percentage-based revenue sharing model.
- Customization: The affiliate can customize the ransomware payload by setting specific ransom amounts, selecting their preferred methods for targeting victims, and tailoring communications such as demands for ransom.
- Deployment: RaaS-based ransomware is then deployed, often using techniques such as phishing, compromised websites, or remote desktop exploits.
- Infection and encryption: Once the ransomware has breached a target’s systems, it encrypts valuable data, locks users out, and delivers a ransom note.
- Payment and profit sharing: If the victim pays, the RaaS platform facilitates payment, usually in cryptocurrency, and splits the ransom between the affiliate and the ransomware developer.
Ransomware as a service makes cyberattacks easier than ever to orchestrate and substantially harder to predict. That’s why timely ransomware detection and rapid response are so essential. The Pure1® AIOps platform, for example, includes advanced capabilities that can detect suspicious activity during an attack. In the event that your organization is targeted by attackers, a well-designed cyber resilience architecture helps ensure you can recover quickly and completely, without caving to demands for ransom.
The Rise of Ransomware as a Service
Ransomware as a service has grown rapidly, in large part because it’s highly profitable. Hefty ransoms and untraceable cryptocurrency payments make RaaS a lucrative venture. RaaS also extends easily to any country around the globe. RaaS kits are accessible via the dark web and come with customer service, documentation, and regular updates.
The real catalyst, though, is in the ability of RaaS to lower barriers to entry. Launching successful, sophisticated ransomware attacks requires minimal technical knowledge.
Prominent RaaS platforms such as REvil, LockBit, and DarkSide have been responsible for high-profile breaches across multiple industries.
Risks and Implications of Ransomware as a Service
The implications of ransomware as a service are profound. First and foremost, RaaS “democratizes” sophisticated cyberattacks, making it easier than ever to launch successful breaches, then collect ransom from victims around the world. As a criminal business model, it expands the potential footprint for highly skilled hackers, leading to a proliferation of ransomware attacks.
The effects on ransomware victims are substantial:
- Business disruption: Ransomware can halt operations for days or weeks as poorly prepared organizations struggle to restore data from backups, rebuild systems, and get back online.
- Financial losses: Costs include ransom payments, downtime, legal fees, and lost revenue. To make matters worse, payment of an initial ransom may not resolve the problem, as hackers continue their demands for even more money and their restoration instructions and decryption keys may not work.
- Reputational damage: Data breaches and prolonged outages erode customer trust and can potentially lead to regulatory scrutiny or penalties.
- National security concerns: Critical infrastructure, hospitals, and government agencies are frequent targets.
The sophistication and scalability of RaaS demand advanced protection strategies. Pure Storage® SafeMode™ Snapshots, for example, help mitigate ransomware threats by creating immutable, undeletable data copies that can’t be encrypted or erased, even by admin accounts.
How to Defend against a Ransomware Attack
Businesses and individuals must take proactive steps to defend against RaaS:
Protecting your organization from ransomware requires a strategic approach across all stages of an attack: before, during, and after.
Before an attack, organizations should focus on building a resilient architecture. This starts with implementing immutable backups, such as SafeMode Snapshots, which prevent tampering or deletion, even by compromised admin accounts. To catch threats early, organizations can deploy anomaly detection tools, which identify unusual behaviors or access patterns before they escalate. Just as important is employee training, ensuring that staff can identify phishing emails and social engineering tactics that often serve as the launching point for ransomware. Regular patch management is also essential for closing security gaps that attackers often exploit.
During an attack, speed and containment are critical. It’s vital to lock down access, limiting user permissions and isolating compromised systems to prevent the spread of the infection. With the help of real-time monitoring and analytics, organizations can track lateral movement and disrupt the attacker’s progress. Even in the midst of an attack, tools like SafeMode continue to play a critical role by preventing data loss, ensuring backup copies remain untouched and accessible.
After an attack, recovery needs to be fast, clean, and complete. Solutions like Pure Storage FlashBlade® and FlashArray™ with layered resilience enable organizations to restore petabytes of data quickly, reducing costly downtime. With Evergreen//One™, businesses can be confident that their data is restored to a clean, uncompromised state, avoiding the risk of reinfection. Lastly, having a well-rehearsed incident response plan ensures that teams know how to act decisively, minimizing operational disruption and financial fallout.
Pure Storage is uniquely positioned to help with each of these stages. From immutable SafeMode Snapshots to intelligent anomaly detection and high-speed recovery capabilities, Pure Storage empowers organizations to stay ahead of RaaS threats and bounce back stronger.
Learn more about Pure Storage ransomware backup and recovery solutions and how you can protect your data—before, during, and after an attack.
