The Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) ecosystem has changed the look and shape of modern day ransomware attacks. Malicious actors typically view their cybercrimes as a business, hoping to make the most amount of money with the least amount of effort. For example, according to research, AI-automated phishing attacks performed similarly to human generated ones and 350% better than the ones sent to the control group. Further, the researchers found AI-automated information gathering was accurate and useful in 88% of cases, making spear phishing campaigns easier and more cost efficient.
As attackers automated these processes, identifying and mitigating ransomware email threats becomes both more important and more challenging. Increasingly, attackers use sophisticated social engineering tactics to bypass traditional defenses and convince people to take actions against their best interests.
By understanding why these ransomware email threats are successful, security teams can improve their risk mitigation strategies.
How Do Ransomware Email Threats Work?
Ransomware attack emails are a way for cybercriminals to engage in social engineering without having to be in the same physical location as their victim. Social engineering means manipulating people’s emotions to coerce them into taking actions that are against their best interests, like providing login credentials.
Phishing
The most common ransomware email threat is phishing, where attackers send out high volumes of fake emails that look like ones legitimate sources would send. The email includes either a malicious link or attachment that, when clicked or downloaded, installs the ransomware on the user’s device. According to KnowB4, delivering ransomware by phishing email increased by 22.6% between September 2024 and February 2025.
Spear phishing
While traditional phishing seeks to reach as many people as possible, spearphishing takes a more targeted approach. The cybercriminals craft highly personalized emails after researching their targets, like individuals, teams, or specific organizations.
For example, the cybercriminals may use social networks, like LinkedIn, to gain information about the organization and its employees. They use this information to craft and send emails about projects discussed publicly, like webinars, or that reference other employees.
Since the recipients view these emails as credible, they are more likely to take the suggested and, often, harmful action.
Whaling
As a subcategory of spearphishing, whaling targets high-profile individuals within the organization, like senior leadership. Cybercriminals target employees with privileged access to the most sensitive data or who can approve large financial transactions.
For example, an email impersonating the chief executive officer (CEO) might request that the chief financial officer (CFO) urgently approve a wire transfer. These emails may succeed for various reasons, like the recipient being:
- Distracted which makes them less likely to review the email closely.
- Rushed which makes them more likely to respond quickly rather than taking the time to evaluate the email’s veracity.
- Concerned about failing to complete a job function in a timely manner which makes them take the email at face value.
Why Are Ransomware Email Threats So Successful?
Despite employee awareness training, ransomware email threats remain successful. Phishing campaigns target the human element and seek to evade security tool detections.
Human Element
Phishing attacks that deliver ransomware often exploit the way people think and behave. Some reasons that people often fail to identify phishing emails include:
- Trust in authority: People want to comply with requests from bosses, human resources, or IT departments which is why fake invoices, password reset requests, and urgent security alerts are successful.
- Urgency and fear: When messages contain a time-sensitive threat, people act quickly, often without thinking rationally about their response.
- Curiosity and reward: Even when people realize the offers feel too good to be true, their innate desire to find out more takes over, making them more likely to click on the malicious link or download.
- Routine and cognitive load: People can receive dozens of emails every day, making them more likely to skim the content rather than look for phishing red flags.
- Personalization: People may overlook potential issues with a phishing email when it references personal or professional details, like those cybercriminals can gain from social media.
Technical Factors
Despite layered defenses, ransomware email threats still manage to evade security tools for various reasons, including:
- Evasion technique: Attackers change emails to prevent them from matching known malicious signatures, like obfuscating URLs, using image-based text, or varying the domain to evade filters.
- Using legitimate infrastructure: Cybercriminals often use compromised email accounts or cloud services to prevent security tools from identifying them as malicious, like using Outlook accounts to send emails or sending links from Dropbox.
- Zero-day deployment: Malicious actors consistently evolve their payloads from ones seen in threat intelligence feeds to evade signature-based tools.
- Inability to understand context: Tools only scan for technical markers so while messages meet the tool’s requirements, they may not be normal for the recipient.
Best Practices for Mitigating Ransomware Email Threats
A comprehensive ransomware threat mitigation strategy requires a multi-layered approach that combines technology, process, and people.
Implement Email Security
Email security is a multi-faceted process that includes:
- Changing default configurations on the email server.
- Monitoring the email server for vulnerabilities.
- Using domain-based message authentication, reporting and conformance (DMARC) to mitigate spoofing risks.
- Encrypting messages and authenticating senders.
- Collecting email security telemetry like blocked threats, quarantined messages, impersonation attempts, URL protections, and data loss prevention (DLP) triggers.
Centralize Security Data
Centralizing all security telemetry enables security teams to correlate log data across:
- Email security tools that filter out malicious messages.
- Endpoint detection and response (EDR) tools that identify malware signatures.
- Firewall log data that tracks inbound and outbound network traffic, including communications from potentially malicious IP addresses.
For example, by mapping Sigma rules to the MITRE ATT&CK framework’s tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs), the security team can look for indicators of compromise and trace the attack path.
Integrate Threat Intelligence
Threat intelligence provides real-time information about attacker activity, like malicious domains and evolving phishing campaigns. Security teams can integrate these feeds into their security incident and event management (SIEM) solution, enabling them to identify known indicators of compromise (IOCs) and emerging trends. By adding this information to their detections, they create high-fidelity alerts that enable them to respond to a potential incident faster.
Identify Very Attacked Persons (VAPs)
Increasingly, cybercriminals target various employees by using social media and organizational chargers to identify people with valuable access. VAPs are no longer just people with privileged access, they can be average employees whose job function requires access to multiple network resources. To mitigate this ransomware email threats, security teams should:
- Correlate data: Review who experiences most phishing emails, malware, and credential stuffing attacks to see if the endpoint security tools identify similar patterns.
- Build people-centric dashboards: Aggregate the security monitoring data in dashboards for visibility into attack trends over time.
- Tie alert priority to VAP risk: Set VAPs as high-risk users so analysts know to prioritize those investigations.
Graylog Security: High-Fidelity Alerts with Risk Scoring That Amplifies Real Threats
Graylog Security enables security teams to identify and protect their VAPs by incorporating the monitoring into their daily detection and response workflows. Graylog ties together threat intelligence, anomaly detection, and asset data enrichment to give SOCs and CISOs real-time, contextualized views of their people and IT environments. Our platform incorporates threat intelligence into risk scoring to improve detections, enabling security teams to connect the dots between alerts for improved workflows and faster ransomware email threat detection.
With Graylog Security, organizations can build a VAP-focused detection and response strategy that connects the dots between data, alerts, and people, enabling a proactive threat detection and incident response strategy that mitigate human element risks.
