Ransomware victims hit 5,984 in H1 2026, up 1.35x

S2W reported that global ransomware victim numbers in the first half of 2026 rose about 1.35 times year-on-year, reaching 5,984 leak-site postings, according to ascii.jp. In Japan, 64 ransomware victims were recorded in the same period, about 1.6 times the 2025 half-year average of 39 and the highest among Japan, Taiwan and South Korea.

In Japan, victims of the ransomware group The Gentlemen rose from 1 last year to 13. Globally, reports of state-sponsored APT groups totaled 158, up 7.5% from 147 in the second half of 2025, with North Korea accounting for 99, China 33 and Russia 26.

Separately, Cybersecurity Cloud observed about 1.07 billion cyberattack detections in July-September 2026, up 16.3% from the previous quarter, averaging about 11.65 million per day and about 135 per second. September 2026 saw about 450 million attacks, about 1.6 times July's figure, with about 21.42 million recorded on September 26.

Web scans and SQL injection attempts surged simultaneously in September, indicating automated coordination, the report said. One attack on a Japanese e-commerce site involved up to 190,000 attacks from different IP addresses in a single day. A separate report observed an attack using 326 different IP addresses and over 1,200 accesses in about 40 minutes in Japan.

Malware was also found embedding numerous prompt injections aimed at disrupting LLM-based security agent threat analysis.