SUMMARY

On April 29th, 2021, the RTF published Combating Ransomware: A Comprehensive Framework for Action (“the Report”), which offered 48 recommendations for industry, government, and civil society action designed to deter and disrupt the ransomware business model, and to help organizations prepare for and respond at scale to such attacks.

In the year since, we have seen a great deal of action to combat ransomware, yet we have also seen the numbers of observed incidents continue to rise even as stakeholders focus on the threat itself. This summary briefly discusses some of the ransomware-related activity of the last year, its impact, the current threat level, and our recommendations for moving forward, highlighting the following takeaways:

• The work that has been undertaken to combat ransomware in the past year was unprecedented and laid a strong foundation for future actions.
• The threat landscape evolved along with the financial and geopolitical forces shaping global affairs and the full scope of the ransomware threat remains unknown because of a lack of sufficient attack and payment data.
• The same coalition that assembled a year ago remains ever vigilant and active in this fight via the RTF because a unified global effort is needed to combat the evolving ransomware threat.