Ransomware continues to dominate the cyber-threat landscape in Canada, and the newly released Ransomware Threat Outlook 2025–2027 paints a sobering picture of what organizations should expect in the coming years. Our BlueSky Risk Intelligence team reviewed the findings closely and distilled the most important insights for Canadian executives, security leaders, and risk professionals. The conclusion is clear: ransomware is no longer an episodic IT problem, it is a persistent, strategic risk to operations, reputation, and public safety.
An Expanding Criminal Ecosystem
The outlook emphasizes how ransomware has matured into a professionalized criminal enterprise. What began as simple malware designed to encrypt files has evolved into a multi-layered extortion industry supported by organized networks, specialized brokers, and subscription-style ransomware platforms sold to affiliates. These Ransomware-as-a-Service models have dramatically lowered the technical barrier to entry, enabling a larger pool of criminals to conduct sophisticated intrusions at scale. At the same time, threat actors are adopting artificial intelligence to automate reconnaissance, craft more convincing phishing lures, and accelerate malware development, further increasing the speed and impact of attacks.
Canadian organizations of every size are considered potential targets. The report highlights that most ransomware actors are financially motivated and opportunistic, scanning widely for outdated software, exposed remote services, weak authentication controls, and staff vulnerable to social engineering. Once inside a network, attackers frequently move laterally, escalate privileges, steal sensitive data, and carefully position themselves to cause maximum disruption before delivering ransom demands.
From Encryption to Multi-Layered Extortion
Today’s ransomware campaigns rarely stop at locking systems. The outlook describes a growing reliance on “double extortion,” where stolen data is leveraged alongside encryption to pressure victims into paying. In some cases, criminals escalate further through “triple extortion,” adding denial-of-service attacks or direct outreach to customers, suppliers, and executives. Another increasingly common model involves data theft alone, where attackers bypass encryption entirely and simply threaten to release sensitive information unless payment is made. This approach is faster to deploy and still inflicts serious regulatory, reputational, and legal consequences.
Several ransomware families are identified as posing particular risk to Canadian organizations, including Akira, Play, and Medusa. These groups operate internationally, use affiliate-driven models, and have targeted industries ranging from manufacturing and telecommunications to professional services and critical infrastructure. Their continued activity underscores how quickly ransomware groups adapt to law-enforcement pressure and defensive improvements.
Which Sectors Face the Greatest Exposure?
While no industry is immune, the report highlights a number of sectors facing elevated risk. Critical infrastructure remains at the top of the list, energy, healthcare, finance, transportation, and communications are consistently targeted because disruptions can have cascading effects across the economy and threaten public safety. Healthcare organizations are particularly vulnerable due to their reliance on digital records and the life-safety implications of service outages.
Public-sector organizations and government departments are also frequent targets, given their visibility and complex operating environments. Small and medium-sized businesses continue to be heavily impacted as well, often lacking the internal security resources or monitoring capabilities needed to detect intrusions early. Managed service providers represent another major risk category; a compromise of a single provider can grant attackers access to dozens of downstream clients, amplifying the damage across entire supply chains. Manufacturing, logistics, retail, and technology firms are likewise being targeted for the leverage attackers can gain by shutting down operations.
The True Cost of Ransomware
The consequences of a ransomware incident extend far beyond ransom payments. Organizations routinely experience prolonged downtime, data loss or corruption, theft of personal and proprietary information, reputational harm, regulatory scrutiny, litigation, and months of costly recovery work. In essential-service sectors, ransomware can disrupt patient care, transportation systems, and public utilities, turning a cyber incident into a broader societal issue. Even companies that refuse to pay often face significant indirect losses as systems are rebuilt and trust is restored.
What the Cyber Centre Recommends
To counter these growing threats, the outlook places strong emphasis on prevention, preparedness, and resilience. Basic cyber hygiene remains foundational: timely patching, multi-factor authentication, network segmentation, and well-tested offline backups continue to be among the most effective ways to blunt ransomware attacks. Employee awareness training is also critical, as phishing and social engineering remain leading entry points for attackers.
Organizations are encouraged to strengthen incident-response capabilities by developing formal response plans, running tabletop exercises, and establishing relationships with forensic experts, legal counsel, insurers, and law-enforcement partners before a crisis occurs. Continuous monitoring, endpoint detection and response tools, and centralized logging systems can dramatically reduce dwell time and limit the scale of an intrusion once attackers gain access.
Supply-chain security is another major theme. Regular vendor assessments, contractual cybersecurity requirements, and restricted third-party access can reduce systemic exposure. For high-impact sectors, advanced strategies such as zero-trust architectures and threat-intelligence-driven monitoring are increasingly essential.
The Outlook Through 2027
Looking ahead, the report forecasts that ransomware will remain one of the dominant cyber threats facing Canada. Criminal groups are expected to further integrate artificial intelligence, expand affiliate networks, and experiment with new extortion techniques. Cryptocurrencies and decentralized financial platforms will continue to complicate investigations and enforcement efforts. At the same time, the outlook suggests that widespread adoption of strong cyber practices, improved detection technologies, and coordinated public-private collaboration could significantly reduce the overall impact of attacks for organizations that invest early.
How BlueSky Helps Organizations Stay Ahead
At BlueSky, we complement national-level threat assessments with dedicated monitoring of cyber-criminal activity across open-source, deep-web, and dark-web environments. Our analysts track ransomware groups, breach-notification forums, credential marketplaces, and data-leak sites where attackers advertise stolen access or publish victim disclosures. This includes identifying compromised corporate emails, exposed credentials, leaked datasets, and the circulation of personally identifiable information tied to client organizations or their partners.
When indicators emerge, we provide timely alerts, context, and practical recommendations, enabling organizations to revoke access, reset credentials, initiate forensic reviews, meet regulatory obligations, and prepare communications before exploitation escalates. By combining automated collection with human-led analysis and cross-sector intelligence correlation, BlueSky delivers early warning and decision-grade insight for executive, legal, and security leadership. If you would like access to our full review of this topic or would like to learn more about BlueSky’s intelligence capabilities, please reach out to our team directly.