Industrialized Ransomware: Confronting The New Reality
Akamai-Technologies, Tuesday, February 10th, 2026
On Easter Weekend 2025, something was amiss at one retailer's stores across the United Kingdom. Contactless payments failed. Click-and-collect orders vanished. Shelves emptied.
Retailers depend on holiday weekends for revenue. Instead, this retailer would ultimately report a 300 million UK pounds loss in market value, resort to pen and paper to track inventory, and shut down its entire online operation for more than six weeks.
The culprits were not nation-state actors or elite hackers but loosely affiliated groups of cybercriminals using commercially available ransomware as a service (RaaS) tools.
It's enough to make you question your current security posture.