April 14, 2026
Payday for pirates, panic for budgets
Ransomware Is Growing Three Times Faster Than the Spending Meant to Stop It
Readers say: stop paying crooks, blame crypto, and roast Big Cyber spend
TLDR: Ransomware claims rose 30.7% in 2025 while security spending grew ~10%, widening the gap. Commenters are split: ban ransom payments like dealing with kidnappers, blame a wasteful security industry, say it’s culture not cash, or point at crypto—proving the fix is as contested as the problem itself.
Ransomware “confession posts” by hacker gangs jumped to 7,760 in 2025—up 30.7%—while worldwide security spending rose about 10%. Cue the comments section meltdown. One camp is yelling “just make ransom payments illegal,” arguing you don’t negotiate with kidnappers, so don’t bankroll data thieves either. Another camp torches the entire industry: more budgets, same breaches, calling it a bloated ecosystem addicted to fear and PowerPoints.
Then the contrarians chime in: maybe this spike is about bragging, not hacking. As one commenter put it, posting victims on leak sites is trendier now, so of course the counts rise. Others say money isn’t the magic key—culture is: fix backups, patch stuff, train people, and stop clicking everything.
Amid the debate, the joke of the thread lands like a mic drop: “Thanks, Satoshi.” Translation for non-nerds: crypto makes anonymous payouts easy, so some blame Bitcoin for the ransomware boom. Meanwhile, the data shows 136 groups prowling in 2025, with a handful doing half the damage—yet nearly half the claims come from everyone else, suggesting a chaotic swarm rather than a single supervillain.
Bottom line the crowd agrees on? The gap is real—but whether to ban payments, gut-check security culture, or call out crypto, the comment section is more split than a breached database.
Key Points
- •CipherCue recorded 7,760 ransomware leak‑site claims in 2025, up 30.7% from 5,939 in 2024—the highest annual total since 2020.
- •Gartner estimates worldwide information security end‑user spending rose about 10.1% from $193.4bn (2024) to $213.0bn (2025), with $239.8bn forecast.
- •Observed ransomware claim volume grew roughly three times faster than aggregate security spending in 2025, though the measures are not directly comparable.
- •136 distinct ransomware groups were observed in 2025 (up from 116 in 2024); the top ten groups accounted for 54.7% of claims.
- •2025 exceeded 2024 in 10 of 12 months, with a Q1 surge (2,418 vs 1,234) and a peak in February 2025 (1,050 claims).