A meticulously built fortress of data backups, once the gold standard of cyber defense, is now proving to be an inadequate shield against a new and insidious form of digital siege. In this evolving threat landscape, attackers are no longer content with merely locking the gates; they are stealing the crown jewels and threatening to parade them in the public square. This fundamental change in tactics, a pivot from encryption to pure extortion, marks a critical inflection point for organizations worldwide, forcing a complete reevaluation of what it means to be secure. The threat is no longer just about business continuity; it is about reputational survival.
The New Ransomware Paradox
For years, the ransomware playbook was straightforward: criminals encrypted critical files, and victims paid a ransom to regain access. In response, businesses invested heavily in backup and recovery solutions, creating a reliable countermeasure that could restore operations without capitulating to demands. This defensive strategy turned ransomware into a manageable, albeit costly, operational risk.
The paradox of the new era is that these robust backups are rendered almost irrelevant. When attackers bypass encryption entirely, focusing solely on exfiltrating sensitive data, the leverage shifts dramatically. The threat is no longer a locked file but the public release of confidential corporate strategies, customer information, or proprietary intellectual property. This extortion-only model attacks an organization’s reputation and legal standing, a threat against which a simple data restore offers no protection.
Beyond Encryption to a Data Theft Epidemic
The scale of this strategic pivot is startling. A landmark analysis revealed that while traditional ransomware attacks saw only a marginal 1% increase in 2025, reaching 4,737 incidents, encryptionless extortion campaigns exploded. The number of attacks relying solely on the threat of data leakage skyrocketed from a mere 28 incidents in 2024 to nearly 1,500 in 2025. This exponential growth is not an anomaly but a clear indicator of a calculated shift in criminal methodology.
This data illustrates a conscious decision by threat actors to pursue a path of lower technical resistance and potentially higher returns. By forgoing the development and deployment of complex encryption malware, attackers can streamline their operations, reduce the chances of detection, and apply immense psychological pressure on their victims. The fear of regulatory fines, customer backlash, and competitive disadvantage often proves a more potent motivator for payment than the inability to access internal systems.
The Anatomy of an Encryptionless Attack
A primary entry point for these attacks is the exploitation of unpatched vulnerabilities, particularly zero-day flaws that leave organizations exposed. A notable example involved CVE-2025-61882, a critical vulnerability in Oracle E-Business Suites that permitted remote code execution. Threat actors leveraged this flaw to gain an initial foothold within corporate networks, silently navigating systems to identify and exfiltrate high-value data long before their presence was ever detected.
The software supply chain has also emerged as a new front line. Cybercriminal syndicates, such as the notorious ShinyHunters, have demonstrated mastery in compromising third-party applications to access their primary targets. In one campaign, the group targeted global companies by infiltrating their Salesforce instances not by hacking Salesforce directly, but by using social engineering and voice phishing to compromise credentials for integrated third-party extensions, thereby gaining access to a trove of sensitive user data ripe for extortion.
Expert Analysis on the Evolving Threat
Insights from a joint report by Symantec and Carbon Black confirm that this trend represents a deliberate and strategic evolution by sophisticated threat actors. They are actively choosing extortion-only attacks because they have proven to be highly effective. This pivot is not a random mutation in the cybercrime ecosystem but a calculated business decision aimed at maximizing profit while minimizing the technical complexity and risk of their operations.
This evolution forces enterprises to confront a daunting dual threat. Security teams must now simultaneously defend against two distinct attack outcomes: the operational paralysis caused by file encryption and the catastrophic reputational damage resulting from data exfiltration. This broadens the risk profile significantly, as a successful defense against one does not guarantee safety from the other. A company can have perfect backups and still be forced to negotiate with criminals to prevent a devastating data leak.
A Proactive Defense for a New Era of Extortion
Countering this new wave of extortion demands a shift from a reactive to a proactive defense posture. Organizations can no longer afford to focus solely on perimeter security and post-breach recovery. Instead, a multi-layered security strategy that assumes a breach is inevitable and prioritizes data visibility, protection, and threat detection across the entire digital environment is essential.
Foundational to this strategy is the implementation of rigorous technical controls. This includes conducting regular and thorough audits of all software, ensuring that security patches are applied promptly to close vulnerabilities like the one found in Oracle’s suite. Furthermore, enforcing strong credential hygiene through the mandatory use of multi-factor authentication (MFA) across all applications and services creates a critical barrier against unauthorized access, even if credentials are compromised.
Finally, organizations must extend their security scrutiny to the entire software supply chain. Every third-party add-on, extension, and integration represents a potential entry point for attackers. Vetting these components, understanding their permissions, and monitoring their behavior are no longer optional but are critical components of a comprehensive defense against attackers who view these trusted connections as their primary path into a target’s network.
The rise of encryptionless extortion was more than just a new trend in cybercrime; it was a fundamental redefinition of the threat itself. Businesses learned that their most valuable asset was not their operational uptime, but their data’s integrity and the trust of their customers. The defensive playbook had to be rewritten, moving beyond system recovery to encompass a holistic strategy of data governance, supply chain security, and unwavering digital vigilance. In the end, the organizations that thrived were those that recognized the battle had shifted from protecting their files to protecting their reputation.
