Key Takeaways

• Ransomware is evolving. It is growing in both scale and sophistication, making comprehensive, modern threat intelligence increasingly necessary for the prevention of ransomware attacks.
• Modern threat intelligence solutions—which use customized, contextualized, and entity-centric threat profiling to identify which threats are most likely to target your specific organization next—offer a proactive solution to these next-generation ransomware attacks.
• Proactive threat intelligence helps prevent ransomware attacks in a multitude of ways, separating signal from noise and automating detection and response by:
  • Providing AI reporting that enables automatic generation of customized, audience-specific ransomware intelligence reports
  • Identifying exposed credentials across the dark web and triggering automated remediation workflows
  • Prioritizing and remediating the common ports and protocols targeted by ransomware actors to proactively fortify potential entry points
  • Delivering an end-to-end view of your ransomware exposure across the attack lifecycle as well as guidance for each threat to identify security risks early, prioritize action, and take targeted mitigation steps.
  • Integrating into existing workflows and security tools to enable efficient, intelligence-driven detection and response to ransomware threats across a variety of areas and aspects of an organization and its operations.
• To successfully integrate proactive threat intelligence into your organization’s security operations, take a three-pronged approach that focuses on people, processes, and technology.
• With the continued evolution of AI and ML, modern threat intelligence is only growing more sophisticated and capable by the day—leading to more intelligent automation, better detection of “weak signals”, reduced false positives, and more entity and organization-specific intelligence that automatically separates signal from noise for actionable insights.

Introduction: The Rise of Next-Generation Ransomware

The face of ransomware is changing. In both scale and sophistication, this long-standing feature of the threat landscape has evolved from an occasional nuisance into one of the most devastating threats facing organizations today.

Attackers and the tactics they employ have evolved dramatically. The emergence of double and triple extortion, ransomware-as-a-service, and AI-assisted campaigns have come together to both lower the barrier to entry for attackers and make modern ransomware attacks more sophisticated and impactful. This was recently evidenced in Verizon’s 2025 Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR), which found that ransomware was present in nearly half (44%) of all breaches in the past 12 months, up from just 32% the year prior. And as for the changing tactics, a recent study from Sophos revealed that exploited vulnerabilities now account for nearly a third (32%) of all ransomware incidents today, surpassing phishing for the first time as the leading technical root cause behind these attacks.

As the face of ransomware continues to change and evolve, traditional defenses, such as backups, patching, and endpoint detection, are no longer enough. Though they remain necessary, they are no longer up to the task of defending against today’s ransomware landscape on their own. Attackers move too quickly, exploit vulnerabilities too efficiently, and adapt too rapidly. To truly shift the balance, organizations must pivot from a reactive stance to a proactive one. That’s the promise of modern threat intelligence.

A Look at Best of Breed Threat Intelligence: What Sets it Apart, and Why That Matters

At its core, modern, proactive threat intelligence is about getting ahead of attacks before they materialize. By leveraging advanced analytics, AI, and ML, proactive threat intelligence works to forecast emerging threats and adversary behavior. By continuously sourcing information and analyzing patterns across the open, deep, and dark web—alongside analyst research findings and entity-centric intelligence—modern threat intelligence reveals early indicators of targeting, exploitation,, and vulnerabilities with contextual specificity to a given organization.

This proactive capability allows security teams to anticipate and prioritize risks based on likelihood and impact, enabling proactive detection, faster mitigation, and more strategic resource allocation.

Threat intelligence, has traditionally, been largely reactive. It often compiles indicators of compromise (IOCs) after an attack has already occurred, aggregating things like past attacker TTPs to help detect or respond to threats that have already emerged. To make the flip from reactive to proactive, today’s advanced threat intelligence applies machine learning, trend analysis, and adversary modeling to anticipate an attacker’s intent to target an organization and capability to carry out a successful attack, based on past behavior, which vulnerabilities are most likely to be exploited (e.g. weak points in one’s attack surface, exposed credentials, etc.), which ransomware operators are active in your industry, and what attack vectors will likely be leveraged next. This kind of intelligence can then be arranged into a customized threat map, which helps organizations prioritize their defensive efforts intelligently and effectively.

This shift is critical in today’s landscape, where ransomware attacks often break out within hours and many detections are malware-free (2025 has seen a 180% increase in the exploitation of vulnerabilities for initial access). In such a landscape, static indicators simply don’t provide the speed or context needed to provide adequate warning and prevent attacks from taking place. Proactive threat intelligence closes that gap by flagging the specific CVEs and edge exposures gaining attacker traction—well before they show up in your SIEM.

In the end, traditional threat intelligence feeds have become less effective and more burdensome in defending against today’s generation of ransomware. By lacking context, specificity, and the overall depth and breadth of today’s most advanced capabilities, traditional threat intelligence leaves you in a reactive posture, and often leads to alert fatigue—as SOC teams become overwhelmed with countless alerts, unable to separate the signal from the noise. In the end, this can lead to a “boy who cried wolf” kind of burnout that can eventually cause real, legitimate threats to go ignored.

How Proactive Threat Intelligence Prevents Modern Ransomware Attacks

As ransomware continues to grow in scale and sophistication, threat intelligence strategies must grow and evolve with them. Proactive threat intelligence gives organizations just that, going beyond simple CVE tracking, taking into account a greater diversity of signals and using automation to operationalize intelligence specific to your organization. Altogether, this allows organizations to prioritize defenses where attack pressure is headed, plug holes, and shut down channels at elevated risk.

So, what does this brand of proactive threat intelligence look like in action? Here are four ways in which advanced threat intelligence provides profound value in defending against ransomware:

1. Identifying the Threats That Truly Matter: Proactive threat intelligence allows organizations to compile and analyze pertinent threat information with a degree of specificity and granularity that is invaluable in today’s threat landscape. It combines analyst research, data from the dark web, and information relevant to your unique attack surface to create personalized, end-to-end threat profiles to inform and guide mitigation steps.
2. Gaining Context, Customization, and Clarity: Contextualized, entity-centric intelligence also allows organizations to analyze the threat landscape based on ransomware groups, specific threat actors, industries, countries, and TTPs to pinpoint relevant threats. Finally, AI and ML capabilities make it possible to generate automated customized, audience-specific ransomware intelligence reports that allow organizations to stay two steps ahead of ransomware groups and threat actors.
3. Proactively Protecting Your Perimeter: Threat intelligence is also invaluable as a means of proactively protecting against ransomware attacks by securing your defensive perimeter. With 77% of all SaaS application breaches involving stolen credentials, basic identity protection methods like multi-factor authentication are no longer cutting it. Proactive threat intelligence allows organizations to continuously search for exposed credentials across the dark web by login details, associated malware, and initial access brokers. And with the power of AI/ML, advanced threat intelligence platforms can even trigger automated remediation workflows to strategically harden one’s defenses before ransomware attacks strike.
4. Protecting Your Expanding Attack Surface: With over 60% of breaches being tied to unpatched vulnerabilities, and software supply chains growing more complex by the day, the average attack surface is expanding at a dangerous pace. With proactive threat intelligence, organizations can detect high risk CVEs, misconfigurations, end-of-life software, and additional types of exposed assets specific to their organizations that could be used by attackers to launch ransomware attacks. By tracking and monitoring these attack surface vulnerabilities in real time, threat intelligence gives organizations the chance to plug holes and selectively harden defenses before they are ever probed or tested.

By employing advanced threat intelligence in proactive ways such as these, organizations have the opportunity to significantly mitigate their ransomware risk before attacks materialize.

How to Make Proactive Threat Intelligence a Central Part of Your Your Security Operations

Implementing threat intelligence in a proactive manner isn’t just a matter of adopting and deploying software. To truly make proactive threat intelligence a part of your security operations requires a three-pronged approach that integrates people, processes, and technologies.

• People: The shift from traditional, reactive security measures to a proactive, intelligence-driven model requires a fundamental change in mindset among employees across your organization:
  • Train analysts, IT teams, and security professionals to make this mental shift.
  • Encourage cross-functional collaboration between cyber threat intelligence (CTI), SOC, vulnerability management, and IT operations.
  • Ensure security awareness training and simulation testing are up-to-date and aligned with real-world threats and attacker TTPs.
• Processes: Implementing proactive threat intelligence in your organization also requires the adoption of clear policies designed to ensure the tools and tactics are being employed to full effect:
  • Conduct daily intelligence stand-ups and weekly “risk sprints” tied to exposed assets.
  • Develop formal playbooks outlining responses to pre-ransomware signals, and practice these playbooks as if you were responding to a live attack.
  • Establish clear escalation paths to ensure intelligence informs action.
• Technology: To effectively implement this kind of comprehensive, proactive threat intelligence, one must invest in modern tools. Casting a much wider net will help collect a lot more information. Being able to quickly and effectively distill that information into actionable intelligence requires technologies, often powered by AI/ML, capable of separating signal from noise and mitigating the alert-fatigue-inducing false-positives:
  • Invest in modern threat intelligence products and services who provide more than indicators of compromise..
  • Automate where possible, such as auto-blocking risky domains or fast-tracking patching of exposed CVEs being exploited in the wild.
  • Leverage solutions like Recorded Future’s Intelligence Cloud that integrate into your existing workflows to enable an efficient, intelligence-driven response to ransomware.

Once your team and tech are aligned, consider a few of the following best practices to ensure your new, proactive approach to threat intelligence is successfully implemented:

• • Set up a Ransomware Watchboard: Monitor threat actors and affiliates, exploited-in-the-wild CVEs, third-party risk spikes, etc.
  • Pilot a Proactive, Threat-Intelligence-Driven Patch SLA: Ensure rapid patching of internet-facing CVEs with exploit chatter.
  • Create Formalized Playbooks: Define roles and actions to be taken across teams in response to pre-ransomware signals
  • Automate Where Possible: For example, create alerts and playbooks for supply-chain partners that reach certain risk signal thresholds.
  • Don’t Hesitate to Enlist Outside Support: Don’t hesitate to fill skills and bandwidth gaps with third-party services and support. Managed monitoring, analyst support, and more can all be game-changing for teams looking to get the most out of their proactive threat intelligence program.

AI, Machine Learning and the Growing Sophistication of Today’s Threat Intelligence

One of the most profound changes to happen to the ransomware threat landscape has been the arrival of AI. With AI, threat actors are able to refine phishing messages, scale up campaigns rapidly, and launch more targeted, sophisticated attacks.

In the spirit of “fight fire with fire”, today’s most advanced threat intelligence platforms leverage AI and ML to automate, accelerate, and refine intelligence gathering and analysis. With its supreme pattern recognition and anomaly detection capabilities, natural language processing, and sheer speed, AI/ML is in many ways the key to unlocking the proactive model of threat intelligence.

And as these technologies continue to mature and evolve, so will threat intelligence platforms’ abilities to proactively detect and defend against ransomware threats. Here are a few ways in which AI and ML are empowering threat intelligence both now and in the future:

1. Identifying patterns and anomalies: Spotting unusual process chains, atypical access attempts, and suspicious data movement and generating actionable reports and guidance to allow SOC teams to focus on action rather than analysis.
2. Correlating weak signals: Using graph-based inference and ensemble models, AI is able to connect a string of otherwise small anomalies into meaningful signals and threats. In this way, advanced threat intelligence platforms pick up on the emerging threats that their predecessors could not.
3. Reducing alert fatigue: Filtering noise and surfacing only the highest-risk signals to prevent alert fatigue and allow security teams to focus on the threats that matter most. This also liberates teams to work on more proactive strategies to improve security posture.
4. Automating threat intelligence operations: Cutting-edge threat intelligence platforms are using AI and ML to automate more and more of the processes behind the gathering and analysis of threat intelligence. Advanced platforms offer automatic generation of customized, audience-specific ransomware intelligence reports to ensure security teams are fully-informed and focused on the threats that matter most..

These capabilities shift security from reactive detection to proactive defense, operationalizing intelligence at machine speed. Automated workflows can even cycle credentials, initiate lockdowns, or isolate high-risk assets based on early, soft signals. As a result, organizations experience fewer attacks, reduce success rates of those that do materialize, and free up security teams to focus on strategic defense.

Conclusion: An Ounce of Prevention is Worth a Pound of Cure

The changing face of ransomware demands a change in the way we approach threat intelligence. With 48% of ransomware victims suffering reputational damage and lost customers, the stakes have never been higher. And with ransomware attacks growing faster, more numerous, and more sophisticated by the day, it’s high-time for organizations to make the switch from reactive to proactive ransomware defense.

With comprehensive, unbiased, real-time, actionable threat intelligence, organizations can get an end-to-end view of their ransomware exposure across the attack lifecycle as well as guidance for each threat to identify security risks early, prioritize action, and take targeted mitigation steps. With the right tools, training, and policies, a well-implemented, proactive threat intelligence program will make your team feel prophetic.

Responding to a ransomware incident is no easy task. The best way to deal with ransomware attacks is to prevent them in the first place. And as both the stakes and sophistication of these attacks continue to grow, the technological and philosophical shift from reactive to proactive threat intelligence has become vital to stemming the rising tide of advanced ransomware threats.

Ready to get ahead of the growing ransomware threat? See proactive threat intelligence in action today.

Additional Resources

• Recorded Future Webinar: Moving Toward Predictive Security Intelligence
• Intelligence-Driven Defense: Four Critical Ransomware Trends Organizations Must Address