Article
Endpoint Detection and Response: The Closest Thing to a Silver Bullet to Stop Ransomware
Security Recommendations
In its recent report “Combating Ransomware,” the Ransomware Task Force says there’s no silver bullet to solving the ransomware challenge. Instead, the group touts a multi-pronged approach and provides an extensive list of recommendations to help companies better defend against this growing threat.
While I don’t disagree, for example, that coordinated global action and greater awareness to the severity of this threat are necessary, I couldn’t help but notice a glaring omission from their list: behavioral endpoint detection and response (EDR).
Why aren’t more companies using EDR solutions to combat ransomware?
For our clients, our number one recommendation to prevent or recover from a ransomware attack is to deploy endpoint protection. It’s the closest thing to a ransomware silver bullet you’re going to find — and should be a best practice.
EDR solutions are not based on malicious signatures that ransomers can easily evade. Rather, behavior-based EDR tools search for suspicious patterns of behavior that could indicate malware. And unlike antivirus, they are capable of spotting yet unknown malware, including more sophisticated threats like zero-day attacks; and they combine real-time continuous monitoring with automated analysis and response.
Cost effectiveness of EDR
EDR is not costly, especially considering the potential expense of a ransomware attack. Beyond the ransom payment itself come all the associated attack costs. As Kevin Baker detailed in his “Hidden Costs of Cybercrime” blog, companies must understand that, in the event of an attack, they will be paying for: remediation, repair, restoration of data and IT infrastructure, legal counsel, litigation defense, breach notification, business downtime, reputation damage and lost customer trust, regulatory fines, and increased insurance rates.
Many companies choose to stick with traditional antivirus solutions because they are a slightly less expensive option than EDR. But while EDR may cost more upfront, it’s much more cost-effective in the long run. And too many companies are realizing this after it’s too late, once they’ve been hacked and painfully understand they should have and need to invest more in security.
Ease of deployment and effectiveness
EDR is as quick and easy to deploy as a traditional antivirus solution. Like antivirus, EDR is agent-based, and organizations can automatically install it via a group policy or on an individual basis and, within a day, begin to reap the solution’s benefits.
When Arete’s incident response teams are called on to help victims recover from ransomware attacks — on average, 50 cases per month — this speed and ease of deployment are critical. They immediately deploy EDR technology to contain the attack and provide clients with a clean, safe environment to restore their data and operations.
On top of EDR solutions being intuitive and not requiring a high-level of security expertise, they are incredibly effective, offering functionality far beyond the basic scanning, detection, and “known” malware removal of a traditional antivirus tool. They are designed to protect all endpoints, automatically identify suspicious activity, and mitigate threats in real time. In the case of ransomware, this can mean stopping ransomware encryption, lateral movement, and data exfiltration.
At Arete, we’ve only seen threat actors successfully attack behavior-based EDR systems four times in the past five years. In two of those cases, the client had not fully deployed the EDR solution to all endpoints on the network; in the other two, the client had not protected the EDR management console with two-factor access control, which allowed the attackers to turn off the EDR system.
By comparison, antivirus solutions continue to fall a bit short on effectiveness. Because they are based on pre-populated signatures, attackers can easily evade them with simple changes to their code and sadly, almost all the ransomware victims Arete has worked with have had an antivirus solution in place that failed to detect or block the attack.
If the government can’t solve the ransomware problem, what can I do?
It’s good that the U.S. and international governments are calling for actions to end the ransomware scourge — a threat the director of the FBI has likened to the 9/11 terror attacks. Unfortunately, time is not on anyone’s side.
The daily costs of ongoing ransomware attacks to companies and their clients are too high to wait for possible government action — especially when a cost-effective, near-silver-bullet solution is at hand. If organizations, of any size, want to put ransomware attackers out of business, they should look to deploy behavior-based EDR systems today.
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Article
Europol Disrupts AudiA6 Crypto Laundering Service
European authorities have dismantled AudiA6, a major cryptocurrency laundering service linked to ransomware groups and broader cybercriminal networks. Between 2022 and 2025, the platform is believed to have processed over €336 million in illicit funds, enabling threat actors to obscure financial trails and monetize cybercrime proceeds. Its operators are also suspected of running Dark2Web, a dark web forum that facilitated collaboration, services, and connections among cybercriminals globally. This development underscores the expanding role of sophisticated, large-scale cryptocurrency laundering services in sustaining the cybercrime economy, enabling threat actors to obscure illicit funds and evade regulatory controls.
What’s Notable and Unique
Following law enforcement disruption of Cryptex and Garantex, AudiA6 emerged as another platform involved in financial activities linked to ransomware groups. Investigators believe that AudiA6 became a central hub for cybercriminals seeking to launder stolen digital assets while obscuring the transaction trail from authorities.
On June 10, 2026, a coordinated operation resulted in two arrests in Georgia, the dismantling of key infrastructure (30+ servers, 25 domains), the freezing or seizure of over €778,000 in crypto, and the takedown of the AudiA6 and Dark2Web platforms.
Analyst Comments
Ransomware groups and cybercriminal networks are increasingly leveraging sophisticated techniques, including chain-hopping, decentralized exchanges, and mixer-as-a-service platforms, to rapidly move illicit cryptocurrency across multiple blockchains, effectively obscuring transaction trails. Concurrently, the widespread use of fraudulent exchange accounts, mule wallets, and privacy-enhancing tools has elevated cryptocurrency laundering to a core enabler of the cybercrime ecosystem, allowing actors to bypass anti-money-laundering controls at scale. This investigation identified over 6,000 KYC records linked to money-mule accounts, many of which were tied to Russian-speaking intermediaries specifically recruited to facilitate the movement of illicit proceeds. These threat actors systematically used both commercial and domain-controlled email services to establish mule accounts across multiple cryptocurrency platforms. Collectively, these findings underscore the growing scale, coordination, and professionalization of cryptocurrency-enabled crime, highlighting the critical need for sustained, intelligence-led, and internationally coordinated efforts to disrupt these evolving financial ecosystems.
Sources
Ransomware gangs cut off from EUR 336 million ‘AudiA6’ crypto laundering pipeline
Article
Threat Actors Leverage AI for EDR Evasion
A threat actor has developed and deployed a ransomware attack toolkit enhanced with AI-assisted development workflows, enabling automated Active Directory (AD) discovery and improved EDR evasion capabilities. The toolkit leverages agent-based AI systems, such as Claude’s Opus and Cursor agents, for iterative malware development, testing, and refinement.
What’s Notable and Unique
Researchers have highlighted that this toolkit can not only generate ransomware code but also bypass sophisticated security defenses and identify AD networks for malware distribution.
The framework incorporates multiple capabilities, including automated AD discovery and reconnaissance mechanisms, iterative EDR testing environments to refine evasion techniques, and a command-and-control (C2) infrastructure that leverages Telegram APIs and Cloudflare redirectors for stealth.
Additionally, some agents were tasked with checking security research and technical posts for various bypass techniques. The agents recognized what was required for reproduction, extracted the techniques, mapped them to the MITRE ATT&CK knowledge base of adversary behaviors, set up a test lab, carried out the methodology, and reported the results.
After a few repetitions, the modules seemed to avoid nearly all EDR solutions, despite the agent’s initial suggestion of a high failure rate. Although researchers found no evidence that AI was embedded in deployed malware or was operating independently in victim environments, the technology was still used to accelerate the iterative process of developing, testing, and refining payloads against security products, shortening the period between the publication of offensive security research and its practical implementation by threat actors.
Analyst Comments
AI-driven tools like this could accelerate the pace and sophistication of ransomware attacks, enabling even relatively inexperienced actors to launch high-impact campaigns. This development underscores the urgent need for security solutions to adapt to AI-assisted threats. Organizations must respond by strengthening detection engineering, improving visibility across environments, and maintaining robust security fundamentals.
Sources
AI-built ransomware toolkit automates EDR evasion, AD discovery
Pointing a Cursor at evading detection
Article
Arete's 2026 Q1 Crimeware Report
Harness Arete’s unique data and expertise on extortion and ransomware to inform your response to the evolving threat landscape.
Article
CMS Vulnerability Leads to ClickFix Campaign
Threat actors compromised at least 700 education and technology websites in a recent ClickFix campaign by exploiting a critical SQL injection flaw (CVE-2026-26980) in the Ghost content management system (CMS). Adversaries combined the vulnerability with the ClickFix social engineering tactic to steal admin keys and inject a malicious JavaScript that delivers a fake Cloudflare or CAPTCHA verification pop-up, tricking victims into copying and pasting a malicious command into their systems.
What’s Notable and Unique
Rather than targeting the end user first, this campaign is unique in its initial exploitation of the system, followed by social engineering attempts. This hybrid attack style is likely being leveraged to bypass traditional defenses.
This recent campaign also highlights how trusted web properties can be weaponized at scale and coupled with unpatched CMS vulnerabilities. Rather than using the CMS compromise to perpetrate a single attack, threat actors turned it into a supply-chain attack that ultimately affected over 700 trusted websites.
Analyst Comments
As network defenders and their tools enhance threat detection capabilities, adversaries increasingly seek methods to bypass these defenses. By combining vulnerability exploitation, social engineering techniques, and staging for ancillary attacks, this campaign successfully bypassed traditional defenses and inflicted significant impact. Defending against hybrid cyberattacks requires comprehensive security controls beyond simply patching vulnerabilities. Organizations should focus on limiting movement within the environment, detecting abuse of trusted applications, and preventing end-user manipulation.
Sources
700+ education and tech websites hijacked in huge ClickFix malware campaign
Under the engineering hood: Why Malwarebytes chose WordPress as its CMS
Think before you Click(Fix): Analyzing the ClickFix social engineering technique
Ghost CMS Vulnerability Exploited to Infect 700 Sites With ClickFix Malware