Ransomware Ecosystem Turns on Itself as Affiliates Betray Operators

The ransomware underworld has always operated on a fragile foundation of criminal trust. Affiliates borrow malware from operators, split the proceeds, and everyone pretends honor exists among thieves. That illusion shattered in October 2026 when a Russian-speaking affiliate known as Azazel was caught running a parallel extortion scheme behind the back of The Gentlemen, one of the most prolific ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) groups operating today.

According to threat intelligence firm CloudSEK, whose findings were published in a report titled The Gentlemen Files, Azazel built and operated an independent leak site called Leakned — publishing victim data and collecting extortion payments without routing a dime through the Gentlemen program. The betrayal ran alongside the betrayal of victims, creating an unprecedented double-cross that exposed the cracks in the RaaS business model.

A Record-Breaking Year for Ransomware

The internal betrayal comes at a time when ransomware activity has reached historic highs. NCC Group’s Cyber Threat Intelligence Report for August 2026 documented 1,073 ransomware attacks globally in a single month — the highest monthly total of the year and a 12% increase over July’s already record-setting figures. September continued the surge, with Bitdefender recording 790 claimed victims on double-extortion leak sites, a 30% year-over-year increase.

Two groups have dominated the landscape throughout 2026:

• Qilin — responsible for 15% of all attacks in August, leveraging a Rust-based payload designed to evade modern EDR solutions and increasingly targeting vulnerable hypervisor environments
• The Gentlemen — a splinter group from Qilin that has scaled faster than nearly any modern ransomware operation on record, claiming nearly 300 organizations across more than 66 countries since surfacing in mid-2025

The Gentlemen’s growth trajectory has drawn comparisons to the early rise of LockBit 3.0, widely considered the benchmark for RaaS scaling. The group claimed 48 victims in January 2026 and nearly doubled that to 91 in February alone. By September, they were responsible for 13% of all published ransomware attacks, ahead of Qilin at 9% and Akira at 5%.

How the Double-Cross Worked

CloudSEK’s researchers discovered two exposed servers managed by Azazel containing several terabytes of data stolen from logistics, insurance, pharmaceutical, AI, medical device, and government victims across six countries. The affiliate ran two distinct attack chains that demonstrated a skill level well above standard affiliate tradecraft.

The first attack chain involved harvesting secrets from exposed GitLab infrastructure — CI/CD tokens, database credentials, API keys, and SSH private keys. Many of these secrets had been deleted by developers from current repository versions but remained buried in earlier commits, which Azazel systematically mined.

The second chain was even more sophisticated. Azazel targeted a medical-imaging company by exploiting a server-side request forgery (SSRF) vulnerability in an unauthenticated AI medical-imaging API. This allowed him to discover internal services before hunting for credentials to internal data stores. The compromise ran for weeks and ultimately led to the theft of 6TB of data.

Most alarmingly, Azazel used an AI coding assistant connected to a reverse-shell handler via MCP (Model Context Protocol) to send commands to a compromised machine. This represents one of the first documented cases of an attacker weaponizing AI tooling operationally against a victim’s infrastructure — not for research or demonstration, but in a live attack.

The Infrastructure Behind the Betrayal

Azazel’s operation was built for scale and persistence. Rather than using temporary cloud storage or rented infrastructure typical of most affiliates, he maintained a 29TB dedicated staging server connected to a separate 22TB long-term vault. This setup suggests the affiliate was not a short-term opportunist but a professional operator building a sustainable independent extortion business.

The report highlighted the multi-stage compromise: SSRF through an AI inference endpoint, Jasypt decryption, JWT recovery from git history, Grafana cracking, MinIO incremental sync, and Kubernetes kubeconfig harvesting. Each technique reflected deep knowledge of cloud-native architectures that goes well beyond the standard playbook offered by most RaaS programs.

Nation-State Actors Join the Fray

While criminal affiliates like Azazel chase profit, nation-state-linked groups are also deepening their ransomware operations. Symantec researchers reported in October 2026 that Warlock ransomware, developed by a China-nexus threat actor tracked as Longlegs (aka Storm-2603), has continued exploiting vulnerabilities in on-premises Microsoft SharePoint servers to breach critical infrastructure.

The victims included a water utility, a telecommunications provider, a regional government body, and a university — primarily across Portuguese- and Spanish-speaking countries in Europe, Africa, and Latin America. In one intrusion, attackers pushed a tool to disable security software on at least 40 hosts within two hours, then deployed Warlock ransomware on 33 hosts by staging it in the domain’s SYSVOL share, where standard domain replication distributed it automatically.

The group gains initial access through SharePoint vulnerabilities collectively dubbed ToolShell (CVE-2025-49704, CVE-2025-49706, CVE-2025-53770, and CVE-2025-53771). Once inside, they drop a webshell into the SharePoint LAYOUTS directory, harvest ASP.NET machine keys, and forge signed payloads for remote code execution. The continued exploitation more than a year after these vulnerabilities were first publicized underscores how many organizations still run unpatched internet-facing enterprise software.

Law Enforcement Scores Wins Amid the Surge

The news is not entirely grim. On September 30, 2026, an international operation called Operation KillSwitch resulted in the seizure of KillSec’s data leak site and several servers. KillSec, a RaaS group that emerged in mid-2024, had claimed at least 500 victims and conducted more than 1,000 attacks. Agencies from the United States, United Kingdom, Spain, Belgium, Switzerland, Romania, and Greece participated in the takedown, and three KillSec members were arrested — including the operator found in Spain, identified as a young teen.

However, the impact of takedowns remains limited in a landscape where over 400 active ransomware groups now operate. When one group falls, its affiliates and infrastructure quickly redistribute to competing programs, often within days.

What Organizations Should Do Now

The current threat landscape demands a shift from reactive to preemptive defense. Key recommendations include:

• Patch internet-facing enterprise software immediately — SharePoint, Fortinet, and other perimeter systems remain the primary entry vectors for both criminal and nation-state ransomware groups
• Scan Git repositories for leaked secrets — credentials in historical commits are actively being harvested by sophisticated affiliates
• Secure AI and API endpoints — unauthenticated APIs, especially those powering AI inference and medical imaging services, are now viable attack vectors
• Monitor for unauthorized AI tooling connections — attackers are beginning to weaponize AI coding assistants and MCP connections for command execution
• Implement immutable backups and tested recovery procedures — with encryption now paired with data destruction and extortion, recovery without paying requires pristine, offline backups
• Adopt zero-trust network segmentation — The Gentlemen’s exploitation of SYSVOL replication demonstrates how flat Windows domains accelerate ransomware spread

The Bottom Line

The ransomware ecosystem in late 2026 is larger, more fractured, and more internally unstable than ever before. Record attack volumes, the weaponization of AI tooling, nation-state involvement, and now the visible breakdown of trust between RaaS operators and their affiliates all point to a threat environment that is evolving faster than most defensive postures can adapt.

When attackers begin betraying each other, it reveals something important: the ransomware economy has grown so large and so lucrative that internal loyalties cannot hold. For defenders, that instability is both a risk and an opportunity. Fragmented adversaries make more mistakes, but they also generate more noise — and more victims. The organizations that will weather this storm are those that treat ransomware not as an if, but as a when, and invest accordingly in the controls, backups, and response capabilities that make recovery possible without funding the very ecosystem that attacks them.

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Edited by Palawan @QUE.COM
Website: https://QUE.COM Intelligence
Sponsored by: https://MAJ.COM AI Autonomous