Ransomware is no longer solely an IT dilemma; it is a critical business-resilience issue that inflicts financial, operational, and reputational damage. IBM’s 2025 Cost of a Breach Report places the average cost of a ransomware incident at roughly $5.08 million, and although a majority (63%) of victims refuse to pay ransoms, recovery costs and downtime remain crippling.

IBM’s numbers (PDF) also suggest that 16% of breaches involve AI-assisted social engineering tactics. At the same time, the cybersecurity landscape is flooded with over 20,000 new CVEs each year, making signature and IoC chasing impractical. These statistics show that organizations need to rethink how they approach prevention, containment, and recovery. Security measures should also support business goals instead of just meeting technical requirements.

The Limits of Tool-Sprawl Security

Conventional security measures rely on Indicators of Compromise (IoCs) like file hashes and domain names. These methods are reactive, can be easily changed, and do not work well against the high volume of today’s threats and AI-driven social engineering.

Many organizations rely on a collection of separate tools, such as EDR, firewalls, SIEMs, and VPNs. These tools work independently and only cover part of the threat landscape. This broken setup creates visibility gaps, overwhelms SOC teams with uncoordinated alerts, and makes automation difficult because of incompatible and inconsistent telemetry across systems.

As a result, detection occurs too late in the attack lifecycle if at all. Many times the affected company is notified by external entities: law enforcement, security researchers, or even the attackers themselves (when they demand the ransom). Containment is slow, manual, and often ineffective against fast-moving, multi-stage ransomware campaigns that demand unified, behavior-driven defense.

Shift from Indicators to Behaviors: TTP‑first Detection

To fight modern ransomware, organizations must shift from chasing IoCs to detecting attacker behaviors — known as Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures (TTPs). The MITRE ATT&CK framework provides a detailed overview of these behaviors throughout the attack lifecycle, from initial access to impact. TTPs are challenging for attackers to modify because they represent core behavioral patterns and strategic approaches, unlike IoCs which are surface-level elements that can be easily altered.

This shift is reinforced by the so-called ‘Pyramid of Pain’ – a conceptual model that ranks indicators by how difficult they are for adversaries to alter. At the base are easily changed elements like hash values and IP addresses. At the top are TTPs, which represent the attacker’s core behaviors and strategies. Disrupting TTPs forces adversaries to change their entire strategy, which makes behavior-based detection the most effective and resource-consuming method for them to avoid.

Behavioral detection allows defenders to recognize activity patterns like privilege escalation, credential theft, and lateral movement—often ahead of encryption or data exfiltration. This method enhances detection precision, minimizes false positives, and supports faster response.