From Pharmacies to the Cloud: Ransomware and Wiper Attacks Disrupt Russian Businesses Throughout 2025-2026
Positive Technologies has published a detailed study of ransomware and wiper attacks against Russian organizations between 2025 and 2026. The research covers dozens of incidents that affected pharmacies, retailers, airlines, manufacturing plants, and commercial cloud providers.
In April 2026, hacktivists targeted an IT company providing commercial cloud services. Dozens of virtualization servers hosting hundreds of virtual machines were rendered inoperable, and the corporate repository containing client projects was destroyed. Such an attack can prevent the provider from delivering services and may lead to the loss of customer production systems.
Financially motivated groups carried out 44% of successful ransomware attacks, primarily seeking ransom payments. Hacktivists were responsible for another 44%, focusing on maximum disruption rather than financial gain. Hacktivists used wipers in 88% of their operations, while financially motivated actors accounted for only 6% of wiper incidents.
Small and medium businesses were the most frequent targets, suffering 48% of financially motivated attacks and 41% of hacktivist attacks. Large enterprises faced 37% and 39% respectively. Non-profit organizations were hit in 15% of hacktivist cases but only 6% of financially motivated ones.
One of the most active financially motivated groups, Thor, compromised more than 100 Russian organizations across 19 industries between May and November 2025, including media, retail, manufacturing, government agencies, and defense contractors.
In the retail sector, the Stolichki pharmacy chain suffered a July 2025 attack that forced many stores to close and blocked loyalty program access for over a week. The VinLab retail network lost more than 2,100 stores and its online ordering system after a ransomware incident; full infrastructure recovery took more than a month.
Transportation companies also suffered major outages. KrasAvia airline switched all flights to manual operations in July 2025 after a ransomware attack; its website and services remained unavailable for a month. A January 2026 ransomware attack on a major bakery in Vladimir region forced staff to manage logistics using paper documents for two months.
Initial access was most commonly obtained through social engineering (53%), compromised credentials (28%), and exploitation of vulnerabilities (25%). Groups such as DarkGaboon and Fluffy Wolf distributed LockBit 3.0 and Pay2Key via phishing emails themed around accounting documents and tax authorities. The consumerWiper malware was observed spreading as a malicious MSI installer.
Attackers also abused publicly exposed RDP and SSH services, weak passwords stored in Excel files, and supply-chain relationships. In one case, the group C77L used open RDP servers to target small trading and manufacturing companies. Another incident involved exploitation of CVE-2024-54772 in MikroTik RouterOS, allowing attackers to establish persistent tunnels and ultimately deploy BitLocker for encryption.
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