Ransomware and multifaceted extortion have become top cybersecurity threats for organizations of all shapes and sizes.
Overview
Multifaceted extortion combines traditional ransomware and other extortion tactics to coerce victims to comply with hefty demands, making the standard basic disaster recovery procedures inadequate against ransomware attacks.
The highest reported ransomware payment is $75 million USD, with the initial demand being an even higher $150 million USD*. Threat actors have realized they can demand higher ransoms by targeting larger organizations and applying pressure with additional coercion techniques like impaired file availability, threats to publish data, and name-and-shame websites.
*Bloomberg, 2024, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-09-18/gang-got-75-million-for-cencora-hack-in-largest-known-ransom
With robust security protocols, your organization is fitted with the right tools to prevent the intrusions that precede ransomware deployment, hunt for active compromise, and respond faster to attacks.
How It Works
Mandiant provides automated solutions and comprehensive services to bolster both your organization’s preparedness and cyber defense to help protect against multifaceted extortion attacks. Choose services that identify your critical assets, test and strengthen security weaknesses against potential threats, and lessen the severity of attacks against your organization.
Business Case
Extortion operations—spanning ransomware, data theft, and multifaceted extortion—continue to represent the most impactful form of cybercrime.
Cybercrime partnerships have collapsed the median time for initial access hand-offs from more than 8 hours in 2022 to just 22 seconds in 2025. Driven by this extreme speed, prior compromise doubled from 15% in 2024 to become the leading ransomware-related initial infection vector at 30%.
Source: M-Trends 2026
Ransomware Protection and Containment Strategies
Steps organizations can proactively take to harden their environment to prevent the downstream impact of a ransomware event.
Multifaceted Extortion: The Evolution of Ransomware
The evolution of ransomware to multifaceted extortion, highlighting critical differences between the two from tactics to consequences.
Determining your Cyber Risk with Repurposed Ransomware
The use of real attacks—the emulation of native binary code—is critical in testing the effectiveness of security controls. Three Mandiant capabilities enable safe and successful testing with real ransomware attacks.
In your fight against ransomware, Mandiant is with you every step of the way
Prepare
Assess your organization's risk and prepare for possible ransomware attackers with Mandiant experts who can help your organization understand your team's response capabilities before you're a target.
Protect
Identify the activity that precedes ransomware deployment and activate mitigation strategies to avoid a major ransomware and multifaceted extortion incident.
Respond
Rapidly and effectively respond to ransomware and multifaceted extortion attacks and recover your business operations after a breach.
FAQ
Google Workspace's Business Continuity plans can help organizations minimize the impact of outages from other productivity suites. It runs in parallel with your existing solution, so during an outage, your teams can continue working with secure and compliant apps like Gmail, Calendar, and Meet, without disruption or the need for migration.
Learn more about Google Workspace for Business Continuity
Google Cloud Backup and Disaster Recovery (GCBDR) can accelerate your ransomware recovery by safeguarding your critical data in an immutable backup vault. This protects it from being encrypted or deleted by attackers and enables a rapid, reliable restoration of your operations.
Yes, check out the Mitigate ransomware attacks using Google Cloud article on our Cloud Architecture Center which highlights additional controls, features and products that you can leverage. This guide provides a multi-layered defense strategy, offering best practices that span from securing end-user devices to protecting your data and workloads on Google Cloud.