Three structural changes. Remote work put corporate credentials on personal devices outside EDR. Infostealer malware harvests them and ransomware affiliates buy that access. Cloud adoption created east-west traffic between workloads that most security tools can’t see, giving attackers undetected lateral movement space. Hybrid identity, meaning on-premises AD syncing to cloud identity platforms like Entra ID, introduced high-privilege sync accounts that are rarely hardened. Verizon DBIR 2025: ransomware appeared in 44% of all confirmed breaches, up from 32% the prior year. That 12-point jump reflects those structural changes, not smarter malware.
