AI-enhanced social engineering poses particular challenges. Attackers use generative AI to craft contextually appropriate phishing emails and social engineering tactics that bypass traditional security awareness training. The sophistication of these attacks makes human detection increasingly difficult, even for well-trained employees.
The CrowdStrike State of Ransomware Survey makes one thing clear: The future of stopping breaches will be decided by who holds the AI advantage. As attackers weaponize AI to accelerate every stage of their operations, defenders can no longer rely on legacy tools or human-speed response. Staying ahead requires machine-speed detection and response, powered by intelligence and automation that match the pace of modern threats.
The challenge extends beyond organizations’ current capabilities. Nearly half of those surveyed fear they cannot detect and respond to threats as quickly as AI-automated attacks can execute. This speed gap creates operational disadvantages for security teams that rely on human analysis and decision-making processes.
Ransomware Realities Facing Organizations
1. Most organizations are not as ready as they think.
Every organization faces ransomware, but not every organization is prepared to handle it. The CrowdStrike State of Ransomware Survey explores the substantial gap between confidence in global businesses’ ransomware readiness and their actual preparedness — a gap poised to grow as adversaries use AI to launch faster, stealthier attacks.
Explore the full findings in the CrowdStrike State of Ransomware Survey to learn more about the reality behind ransomware readiness.
2. The AI arms race favors speed.
Backup strategies also prove unreliable when organizations need them most. Nearly 40% of respondents could not fully restore data from backups after ransomware incidents. Even organizations that successfully restore from backups face reputational damage and competitive risks from stolen data that attackers retain for future exploitation.
Organizations that pay ransoms face significant ongoing risks: 83% of paying victims experienced repeat attacks, while 93% discovered data was stolen despite payment. The economics of ransomware strongly favor attackers, making payment a poor strategy for organizational protection.
This gap between perception and reality creates dangerous blind spots. Organizations that believe they are well-protected may delay critical security investments or fail to prioritize incident response improvements. The result is a false sense of security, which leaves them vulnerable to increasingly sophisticated threats.
3. Ransom payments aren’t paying off.
The financial impact extends beyond immediate recovery costs. Organizations reported average downtime costs of .7 million USD per incident, but additional impacts create lasting damage through reputational harm, legal penalties, and ongoing competitive risks from stolen data.
This is the confidence illusion: the gap between how ready organizations think they are and how quickly modern adversaries can prove otherwise. As ransomware evolves with unprecedented speed and sophistication, defenders relying on human-speed response and legacy tools fall behind. The answer lies in innovation: While 76% of respondents say the speed of AI-powered attacks makes it harder to stay prepared, 89% view AI-powered protection as the solution.
That’s exactly what the CrowdStrike Falcon® platform delivers. Built for the agentic era, Falcon unifies AI-native protection across endpoints, identities, and cloud environments, giving defenders the speed, visibility, and intelligence needed to outpace AI-powered attacks. By combining adversary-driven threat intelligence with industry-leading detection and response, Falcon puts defenders in front in the race for AI superiority.
Building True Ransomware Readiness
Adversaries now harness AI to automate intrusions and enhance social engineering tactics. A significant 76% of organizations reported that preparation becomes increasingly difficult as attackers use AI to adapt and evade traditional defenses.
Adversaries are using AI to operate at machine speed and evade defenses. Despite this evolution, many organizations are overconfident in their ability to defend against ransomware. Half of the 1,100 global security leaders surveyed believed they were “very well prepared” for ransomware, but 78% of their organizations were attacked in the past year. Fewer than 25% recovered within 24 hours and nearly a quarter suffered major disruption or data loss.
Of the 78% of organizations we surveyed that were attacked in the past year, only 22% recovered within 24 hours, despite believing they were well-prepared. Just 38% addressed the specific security issue that allowed attackers to enter their systems, signifying a lack of urgency to prepare for a future attack.
