In the movie, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Sarah Connor is explaining to her son about the relentless nature of the Terminator, telling him, “It doesn’t get tired. It doesn’t get distracted. It never gives up. It’ll keep coming until it’s terminated or its mission is complete.”
This is the ominous nature of AI-driven ransomware, an advanced form of malware that uses artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to automate, accelerate, and modulate every stage of a ransomware attack. Like the Terminator, it never gets tired or distracted. This threat entity can operate with little or no human oversight and doesn’t require manual processes. It can make autonomous decisions about when and how to strike, which files to encrypt, and how to spread laterally across networks.
What is the Difference Between AI-driven ransomware vs. Traditional Ransomware?
Traditional ransomware attacks typically follow a predefined playbook. It encrypts a victim’s files or systems and demands payment for the decryption key. Early variants spread broadly through phishing emails or exploit kits to deliver their static payloads with little variance in approach.
AI-driven ransomware represents a more sophisticated level of threat. These advanced attacks use AI to enhance and refine each stage of the attack operation:
- Smarter reconnaissance: Capable of scanning networks for misconfigurations or unpatched systems to create a roadmap for the attack.
- Adaptive evasion: Instead of relying on fixed code, AI-powered malware can morph on the fly, making it harder for signature-based antivirus tools to detect.
- Enhanced social engineering: Uses natural language generation and scraped data from social media or corporate sites to create phishing messages that feel highly personal.
- Behavioral mimicry: Can dynamically alter its behavior using machine learning to evade antivirus and endpoint detection systems, even mimicking legitimate processes
- Calculated ransom demands: Can analyze a victim’s financials, company size, and backup systems to set a ransom amount that’s high enough to be profitable but low enough to be paid quickly.
Unfortunately, AI-driven ransomware isn’t a Hollywood creation. PromptLock ransomware was discovered in the summer of 2025 that can autonomously scan, exfiltrate, or encrypt files across multiple platforms. FunkSec ransomware was identified in late 2024 that inherently utilizes multiple extortion methods and is known for charging unusually low ransoms as it strategically prioritizes volume over value.
How to Combat AI-driven ransomware
While this new generation of ransomware is certainly ominous, it doesn’t have to terminate your business operations through extortion or disruption. You just need the right approach, strategy and tools to elevate your security efforts.
Whether a ransomware attack is prescribed or acts on its own, its mission is to exploit vulnerabilities. A pen test by an outside firm like HALOCK Security Labs can identify the vulnerabilities within your enterprise and prioritize them. When conducted by experienced security professionals, a pen test can actually mimic the tactics of a AI-driven ransomware and shed light as to how an intelligent adversary might infiltrate and navigate your systems. A Risk-Based Threat Assessment can also help you identify if your organization is a likely target for ransomware attacks and strengthen your safeguards appropriately.
Conclusion
With this combination of continuous testing and assessments, you can adapt defenses as soon as threat patterns shift. Contact HALOCK to learn how to adapt your security efforts to combat this new threat. Intelligent attacks may be relentless, but the right preparation will unravel their efforts.
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS (FAQs)
1. What is a ransomware risk assessment?
A ransomware risk assessment is a cybersecurity evaluation that measures an organization’s vulnerability to ransomware attacks. It examines systems, processes, and user behaviors to identify potential gaps that threat actors can exploit to breach defenses and execute attacks. The scope of the ransomware assessment is conducted and reported on per NIST CSF, NIST RMF, CMMC, and MITRE ATT&CK® matrix standards to make sure your security program is in alignment with your risk exposure.
HALOCK’s ransomware assessments and readiness reviews measure your organization’s preparedness for ransomware, enabling you to understand your current exposure, prioritize remediation, and close security gaps that attackers are most likely to target. The ransomware risk-based assessments are based on an organization’s critical assets and support security teams in understanding and aligning incident detection, protection, and response strategies based on frameworks and standards, including NIST CSF, NIST RMF, CMMC, and MITRE ATT&CK®.
2. How does a risk-based threat assessment work?
A risk-based threat assessment measures the potential risk a specific threat poses to an organization based on its likelihood to occur and the business impact of the threat. It then applies this analysis to security controls and countermeasures to create actionable risk-reduction plans.
HALOCK uses the MITRE ATT&CK® framework to map real-world adversary behaviors, techniques, and processes to your network environment and accounts so that your organization can understand which paths are most relevant to its environment. With this knowledge, security investments and security controls can be applied where the risk is the highest.
3. Why use the MITRE ATT&CK® framework for cybersecurity assessments?
MITRE ATT&CK® is a globally accessible knowledge base of tactics and techniques that adversaries use in their attacks. It is a valuable tool for security teams to identify, understand, and prevent future attacks.
HALOCK includes ATT&CK® in our ransomware and risk-based threat assessments to help organizations create more complete and robust visibility into potential attack vectors to avoid and prioritize defenses that best reduce risk.
4. How can HALOCK help prevent ransomware attacks?
HALOCK can help your organization prevent ransomware attacks by first identifying potential weak points with our compromise assessments, ransomware readiness reviews, and penetration testing.
HALOCK cybersecurity experts then work with your business to develop a risk-based security plan for attack path prevention that applies the MITRE ATT&CK® framework so that all attack paths and known tactics used by adversaries can be prioritized and defended, including your organization’s critical assets and incident response capabilities.
5. What are the benefits of a ransomware readiness assessment?
A ransomware readiness assessment identifies gaps in detection, response, and recovery processes BEFORE an attack occurs so an organization can significantly reduce downtime and have a documented, practiced, and tested incident response plan in place when attacks occur. This helps your business maintain “reasonable and appropriate safeguards” against ever-changing ransomware threats, per cybersecurity and data protection compliance standards and legal guidelines for HIPAA, PCI DSS, NIST CSF, FedRAMP, GDPR, and CMMC.
6. How often should businesses conduct threat assessments?
Businesses should conduct risk-based threat assessments at least annually or whenever their cyber infrastructure or environment has significant changes, such as cloud migration projects, mergers and acquisitions, or extensive software and hardware updates, to ensure defenses remain effective against ever-evolving tactics posted to the MITRE ATT&CK® database.
7. What industries benefit most from ransomware and risk-based threat assessments?
Healthcare, financial services, education, legal, and manufacturing industries can benefit greatly from these assessments due to high data sensitivity and stringent compliance requirements, but every organization should have a ransomware readiness strategy and assessment built into their overall cybersecurity program.
HALOCK tailors ransomware and risk-based threat assessments to each industry’s cybersecurity risk profile, applicable regulations, and inherent legal obligations to third-party customers.
8. What makes HALOCK’s ransomware assessment different?
HALOCK ransomware assessment is unique in that it goes beyond vulnerability scanning to determine whether technical controls are in place to support cybersecurity resilience. We also uniquely apply Duty of Care Risk Analysis (DoCRA) and ATT&CK® mapping to our ransomware and risk-based assessments, ensuring not only the effectiveness of cybersecurity and IT controls, but that those controls are reasonable and appropriate under current cyber regulatory and compliance guidance and legal standards. This can ensure your organization is making reasonable and appropriate efforts to protect customers and suppliers — essential for demonstrating defensible due care.
9. What is the relationship between risk assessments and incident readiness?
Risk assessments focus on identifying and prioritizing potential threats and vulnerabilities that may impact an organization. Incident readiness, on the other hand, is the ability of an organization to quickly and effectively detect, respond to, and recover from a security incident. In short, an incident response plan (IRP) is a vital component of risk management as it outlines the steps an organization should take in the event of a security incident.
HALOCK provides both cybersecurity risk and ransomware assessments and incident readiness as combined services to help clients better prepare for and respond to not only ransomware attacks but also insider threats and APTs.
10. How can I start a ransomware or threat assessment with HALOCK?
Schedule a ransomware or risk-based threat assessment for your business.
Our experts will help you to scope the work and define a roadmap for risk-reduction aligned to standards, including NIST, CMMC, and MITRE ATT&CK®.
