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The New Ransomware Target Is Not Always the CEO
Ransomware has entered a more calculated and deeply personal phase. The days when cybercriminals simply searched for the most famous executive inside a company may be giving way to something more strategic: targeting the people who actually understand how a business operates, where money moves, which contracts matter, and who has the authority to make a crisis disappear.
New research highlighted by The Register, based on Zscaler ThreatLabz observations, suggests ransomware operators are increasingly focusing on managers and other employees with significant “business privilege.” The distinction is important. Someone does not need administrator access to become one of the most valuable people inside an organization.
A finance manager may be able to influence a ransom payment. A procurement manager may know which suppliers are critical. An HR manager may have access to sensitive employee information. An operations manager may understand exactly which production systems would bring the company to a standstill if they were disrupted.
That makes the modern ransomware attack less about finding the person with the biggest title and more about finding the person with the greatest decision-making leverage.
A Month of Attacks Reveals a Striking Pattern
According to the research reported by The Register, ThreatLabz analyzed 351 victims across 334 organizations involved in a ransomware campaign observed over a month. Nearly two-thirds of the compromised victims held manager-level positions or higher.
The average targeted employee was 46 years old, while approximately three-quarters worked in accounting and finance, sales, operations, human resources, or marketing.
Half of the victims reportedly worked in the industrial or IT sectors, highlighting the importance of employees who sit close to critical operational processes.
The pattern is difficult to dismiss as random.
Instead of asking only, “Who has administrator privileges?”, attackers increasingly appear to be asking a different question: “Who can make this company pay?”
Business Privilege Is Becoming More Valuable Than Technical Privilege
Traditional cybersecurity programs have understandably focused heavily on technical privilege. Domain administrators, root accounts, cloud administrators, database administrators, and other powerful accounts are obvious targets.
But ransomware economics have changed the equation.
A manager might not be able to disable an endpoint protection platform or create a new domain administrator account. Yet that same manager may have access to financial information, customer records, supplier relationships, internal communications, contracts, budgets, or strategic plans.
That information can be extremely valuable during an extortion campaign.
The attacker does not necessarily need to control everything.
Sometimes, they only need to compromise the right person.
Attackers Are Studying Organizational Charts
One of the most concerning aspects of the research is the apparent use of organizational reconnaissance.
Attackers can combine information obtained from compromised systems with publicly available information to build a picture of how an organization works.
Corporate websites can reveal departments and leadership structures. Professional networking profiles can expose job titles and responsibilities. Public presentations can reveal suppliers and technology partners. Job advertisements can reveal internal software and operational processes.
None of these pieces of information is necessarily secret.
The danger comes from putting them together.
An attacker who understands who reports to whom can potentially identify employees positioned between technical teams, executives, finance departments, legal teams, and operational leadership.
That person may be far more useful than a CEO.
Why Managers Are Such Attractive Targets
Managers often occupy an unusual position inside an organization.
They have enough authority to influence important decisions, but they may not receive the same security scrutiny as executives or highly privileged IT administrators.
They communicate across departments.
They approve or review processes.
They receive sensitive documents.
They often have broad access to collaboration platforms and cloud services.
And perhaps most importantly, they understand the consequences of operational disruption.
A ransomware operator can exploit that knowledge psychologically.
If a manager knows that production will stop tomorrow, customers will be affected, payroll could be disrupted, or a major contract could be jeopardized, the ransom demand becomes more than a technical incident.
It becomes a business emergency.
Finance Managers Sit Directly on the Money Trail
Finance departments are an obvious example of business privilege.
Financial employees may work with invoices, payment approvals, banking information, budgets, accounting platforms, vendor details, and executive communications.
Even when an employee cannot directly authorize a multimillion-dollar payment, their account may reveal who can.
That information can help attackers understand the internal approval process.
The criminal objective may therefore be less about stealing money immediately and more about understanding the organization’s financial decision-making structure.
Operations Managers Understand What Can Break the Business
Operations personnel represent another high-value category.
Technical teams know which servers exist. Operations teams often know which systems matter most to the business.
That distinction is enormous.
An attacker who compromises someone familiar with manufacturing processes, logistics, supply chains, production schedules, or service delivery can potentially identify the systems whose disruption would create the greatest financial pressure.
This is where ransomware becomes an economic weapon rather than merely a malware problem.
HR Managers Hold Sensitive Human Data
Human resources departments present a different form of leverage.
Employee records can contain highly sensitive information, including identification details, compensation data, employment documents, disciplinary records, benefits information, and internal communications.
The compromise of an HR employee can therefore produce both operational and reputational consequences.
For extortion groups, stolen data does not have to be technically sophisticated to be valuable.
Sometimes the most damaging information is simply information the organization cannot afford to see published.
Sales and Marketing Are Not Outside the Blast Radius
Sales and marketing employees may not look like conventional ransomware targets, but their positions can expose valuable commercial intelligence.
Sales teams can hold customer databases, contracts, pricing information, account histories, proposals, and communications.
Marketing departments may have access to customer platforms, analytics systems, advertising accounts, websites, and external service providers.
These accounts can become valuable stepping stones into broader business environments.
The lesson is straightforward: security risk follows business connectivity, not organizational stereotypes.
Multiple Employees Can Create a Bigger Problem
ThreatLabz reportedly observed more than a dozen organizations in which multiple employees were compromised.
That detail may be more significant than the profile of the individual victims.
A single compromised account can provide an initial foothold.
Multiple compromised employees across different departments can provide context.
One employee may expose finance information. Another may reveal operational systems. A third may provide access to internal communications.
Together, those accounts can give attackers a much more complete picture of the organization.
Ransomware Is Becoming an Intelligence Operation
Modern ransomware groups increasingly behave like intelligence teams before they behave like extortionists.
They search.
They map.
They identify relationships.
They determine priorities.
They locate valuable data.
They learn how the organization responds.
Only then do they maximize pressure.
This represents a fundamental evolution from the older image of ransomware as malware that simply encrypts files and displays a ransom note.
Today’s campaigns can involve credential theft, data exfiltration, lateral movement, surveillance, organizational reconnaissance, and psychological pressure.
Encryption may be only one component of the operation.
The Numbers Show a Broader Ransomware Surge
The wider ThreatLabz research cited in the reporting also points toward an aggressive ransomware environment.
Zscaler has reported that ransomware attacks blocked by its cloud platform increased 146% year over year, while public extortion cases rose by approximately 70% and data exfiltration volumes increased by roughly 92%.
Those numbers reinforce the larger shift toward data theft and extortion.
The attacker increasingly has two weapons: the ability to disrupt the organization and the ability to threaten disclosure.
That combination can create enormous pressure on victims.
The Ransomware Business Model Is Changing
Traditional ransomware depended heavily on encryption.
Steal access.
Encrypt systems.
Demand payment.
The modern model can be much more flexible.
Attackers can steal data without encrypting anything. They can threaten publication. They can target customers, employees, partners, or suppliers. They can use stolen credentials to deepen access. They can compromise several employees simultaneously.
Zscaler’s research has repeatedly highlighted the industry’s movement toward extortion-focused attacks and data theft.
This means organizations cannot measure ransomware risk solely by asking whether their backups are good enough.
Backups remain critical.
But they are no longer the entire defense.
A Backup Cannot Protect Stolen Secrets
A company with excellent backups can potentially recover encrypted systems.
But backups cannot make stolen customer records disappear.
They cannot erase leaked contracts.
They cannot prevent attackers from publishing internal communications.
They cannot reverse the exposure of sensitive employee information.
That is why modern ransomware defense must address data theft as seriously as encryption.
The security objective has evolved from simply maintaining availability to protecting confidentiality, integrity, and business continuity simultaneously.
The Human Layer Has Become a Primary Attack Surface
Organizations spend enormous amounts of money protecting servers, endpoints, firewalls, cloud infrastructure, and applications.
Yet employees remain the interface through which many attacks begin.
The manager receiving a convincing email.
The employee approving a suspicious login.
The sales representative reusing a password.
The finance employee opening a malicious document.
The administrator accepting a fraudulent support request.
Every one of these interactions can become an entry point.
And attackers now have a stronger incentive to identify which employees are most valuable before launching the attack.
Public Information Can Become an Attack Map
The rise of OSINT makes organizational reconnaissance particularly dangerous.
A company’s public website can reveal its leadership.
Professional profiles can reveal responsibilities.
Job listings can expose software platforms.
Conference presentations can reveal infrastructure.
Press releases can identify acquisitions and partnerships.
Public documents can expose business processes.
Individually, these details appear harmless.
Combined, they can create a surprisingly detailed organizational map.
This is why modern security awareness needs to extend beyond phishing training.
Employees should understand that their public professional footprint can become part of an attacker’s reconnaissance process.
Security Teams Need a New Definition of Privilege
The concept of privileged access needs to become broader.
Technical privilege should remain a priority.
But security teams should also identify business privilege.
Who can approve payments?
Who can authorize vendors?
Who can access sensitive contracts?
Who manages customer accounts?
Who understands critical production systems?
Who communicates directly with executives?
Who can make decisions during an emergency?
Who can stop or restart an important business process?
These questions can reveal high-value targets that conventional identity-management reports might overlook.
Identity Security Becomes More Important
When attackers target people rather than machines, identity becomes central to the defense.
Strong authentication, phishing-resistant MFA, conditional access, device trust, least privilege, session monitoring, and rapid account revocation become essential.
Organizations should assume that credentials will eventually be targeted.
The objective should therefore be to ensure that stealing one identity does not automatically unlock an entire business environment.
Zero Trust Becomes More Than a Security Slogan
The principle behind Zero Trust is particularly relevant here.
Users should not receive broad access simply because they are employees, managers, or connected to a corporate network.
Access should be based on identity, device, context, application, risk, and business need.
Zscaler itself promotes a cloud-delivered Zero Trust approach designed to reduce attack surface, prevent lateral movement, and block data exfiltration.
The larger lesson extends beyond any particular vendor: a compromised manager should remain a compromised manager, not become a passport into the entire company.
Incident Response Must Include Business Leaders
Security teams cannot handle this problem alone.
If ransomware attackers deliberately target people who influence business decisions, then those same business leaders need to participate in incident-response planning.
Finance should know what happens when payment systems are compromised.
HR should know how employee data exposure will be handled.
Operations should understand business continuity procedures.
Legal teams should understand notification requirements.
Executives should know who has authority to make emergency decisions.
The organization should not discover these responsibilities after the ransom note arrives.
The Most Dangerous Account May Look Completely Ordinary
This may be the most uncomfortable conclusion from the research.
The account that attackers want most may not belong to an administrator.
It may belong to an ordinary-looking manager who has never appeared on a security team’s “high-risk” list.
That person may have no extraordinary technical capabilities.
Their value comes from what they know, who they know, and what decisions they can influence.
This is the essence of business privilege.
Ransomware Has Become a Psychology Game
Technology gets attackers into organizations.
Psychology helps them get paid.
Once criminals understand who feels pressure, who controls budgets, who reports to executives, and which departments are suffering the most, they can tailor their extortion strategy.
This creates a dangerous feedback loop.
The more attackers understand the organization, the more convincing their threats become.
And the more convincing the threats become, the greater the pressure on employees and executives to make rapid decisions.
Why the 46-Year-Old Manager Matters
The reported average victim age of 46 should not be interpreted as a magical demographic vulnerability.
The more important explanation is organizational maturity.
People in their forties and fifties are often deeply embedded in company processes. They may have spent years building relationships, managing teams, handling budgets, and gaining access to systems required to perform their jobs.
Their value comes from their position within the organization.
The age statistic is therefore less about age itself and more about career seniority and institutional knowledge.
Attackers Are Hunting for Influence
The most important takeaway is not “protect managers more than CEOs.”
It is more nuanced.
Organizations need to identify employees who have influence.
Influence over money.
Influence over operations.
Influence over data.
Influence over suppliers.
Influence over customers.
Influence over incident response.
Influence over executives.
That influence can exist at almost any level of a company.
The Security Perimeter Is Now Organizational
For decades, companies thought about cybersecurity in terms of networks and devices.
Then the focus moved toward identities and cloud services.
Now another layer is becoming increasingly important: the organizational structure itself.
Who communicates with whom?
Who approves what?
Who has visibility into which business processes?
Who becomes critical when something goes wrong?
These relationships can represent an attack surface just as real as an exposed server.
Defending Against Business-Privilege Attacks
Organizations should begin by creating a business-privilege inventory alongside their technical privilege inventory.
Identify employees with access to financial systems, sensitive records, major contracts, operational controls, executive communications, and critical business applications.
Then apply stronger controls to those identities.
Phishing-resistant MFA should be prioritized.
Access should be limited according to business necessity.
High-risk actions should receive additional verification.
Unusual authentication patterns should trigger investigation.
And accounts with broad business influence should be monitored more closely without creating unnecessary surveillance or friction.
Employees Need Context, Not Just Security Training
Traditional security awareness training often tells employees what not to click.
That is useful, but insufficient.
Employees should also understand why attackers might want their account.
A finance manager should understand the value of payment information.
An HR manager should understand the value of employee records.
An operations manager should understand the value of production knowledge.
A sales employee should understand the value of customer information.
When people understand their strategic importance, they are more likely to recognize targeted attacks.
Companies Should Assume Reconnaissance Is Already Happening
Security teams should periodically perform their own external reconnaissance.
What can an attacker learn from the corporate website?
Which employees are publicly identified as finance or operations leaders?
What technology does the company reveal through job postings?
Which suppliers and partners are publicly connected to the organization?
What information is exposed through documents and presentations?
This exercise can expose information that attackers could potentially use to prioritize targets.
The Goal Is Not to Hide Employees
Organizations should not respond by forcing employees to disappear from the public internet.
That is neither realistic nor necessarily desirable.
The better strategy is controlled exposure.
Employees should know what information they publish, understand the risks of revealing excessive operational details, and follow corporate policies for sensitive information.
Security is not about eliminating visibility.
It is about reducing unnecessary intelligence available to adversaries.
The Ransomware Economy Rewards Preparation
Attackers benefit from chaos.
Defenders benefit from preparation.
If an organization has predefined payment procedures, legal contacts, communication plans, backup strategies, identity-recovery procedures, and executive decision-making processes, attackers lose some of their psychological leverage.
The faster an organization can make rational decisions under pressure, the less valuable the attacker’s carefully constructed pressure campaign becomes.
Ransomware Defense Must Become Cross-Functional
The research demonstrates why cybersecurity cannot remain an isolated IT responsibility.
IT protects infrastructure.
Security protects identities and data.
Finance protects financial processes.
HR protects employee information.
Operations protects continuity.
Legal manages regulatory exposure.
Executives manage strategic decisions.
Together, these teams form the
What Undercode Say:
Deep Analysis: The Definition of a High-Value Target Is Changing
Ransomware operators are increasingly demonstrating that technical privilege and business privilege are not the same thing.
The CEO Is Not Always the Best Target
A CEO may have enormous authority, but executives are also among the most visible and heavily protected employees in many organizations.
Managers Can Offer a Better Balance
Managers can combine meaningful access, institutional knowledge, and decision-making influence with comparatively less security attention.
Business Access Creates Hidden Power
A person does not need administrator rights to possess information capable of changing the economics of a ransomware incident.
Finance Is a Strategic Target
Financial employees can expose payment workflows, budgets, vendor relationships, and information about the organization’s ability to absorb disruption.
Operations Is Equally Important
Operations managers often know which systems are essential to keeping the business alive.
HR Creates a Different Kind of Leverage
Sensitive personnel data can create significant reputational, legal, and operational pressure.
Sales Holds Commercial Intelligence
Customer relationships, pricing, contracts, and account histories can become valuable extortion material.
Public Information Makes Reconnaissance Easier
Attackers do not necessarily need sophisticated espionage capabilities when companies publicly reveal large amounts of organizational information.
OSINT Can Connect the Dots
The real danger is not one public profile or one corporate webpage, but the combination of hundreds of small pieces of information.
Ransomware Is Becoming More Selective
The economics of modern extortion favor attackers who can identify valuable people before launching their campaigns.
The Attack Begins Before the Malware
Reconnaissance may happen long before an endpoint is encrypted or a ransom note appears.
Data Theft Changes the Equation
Even organizations with excellent backups remain vulnerable if attackers steal sensitive information before disruption occurs.
Extortion Is Becoming the Core Weapon
Encryption can cause downtime, but stolen data can create lasting pressure long after systems are restored.
Multiple Compromises Are Especially Dangerous
Compromising several employees can allow criminals to build a multidimensional picture of the organization.
Lateral Movement Is Not Only Technical
Attackers can move through organizations by exploiting relationships, shared applications, credentials, and information flows.
Identity Has Become the New Perimeter
Protecting user identities is increasingly as important as protecting network boundaries.
MFA Alone Is Not Enough
Strong authentication reduces account takeover risk, but it cannot eliminate every threat involving compromised sessions, devices, credentials, or authorized access.
Least Privilege Matters More Than Ever
Employees should receive only the access required to perform their responsibilities.
Segmentation Can Limit Damage
Even a compromised managerial account should not automatically provide access to unrelated critical systems.
Monitoring Should Follow Risk
Organizations should pay special attention to identities that combine sensitive access with meaningful business influence.
Incident Response Needs Business Participation
Ransomware decisions are business decisions as much as technical decisions.
Finance Must Be Prepared
Organizations should know in advance how emergency financial decisions will be handled during a cyber incident.
HR Must Be Prepared
Employee-data exposure requires a separate response strategy from ordinary system recovery.
Operations Must Understand Recovery
Critical processes need documented recovery priorities before attackers create an artificial emergency.
Executives Need Clear Authority
Uncertainty among leadership can become another weapon for attackers.
Security Training Must Evolve
Employees need to understand not only phishing but also why their particular role might be valuable to a criminal group.
Business Privilege Should Be Measured
Organizations should identify people whose roles provide unusually broad influence over money, data, operations, or crisis decisions.
Privilege Reviews Should Include Nontechnical Roles
Security teams should stop treating privileged access as something that exists only inside IT.
Organizational Graphs Can Reveal Risk
Mapping reporting lines, application dependencies, and cross-functional relationships can identify hidden concentration points.
External Exposure Should Be Audited
Companies should periodically examine what attackers can learn about their employees and infrastructure through public sources.
Attackers Are Studying Companies Like Businesses
They are increasingly interested in how organizations make decisions, not merely how their networks are configured.
The Human Element Is Becoming More Strategic
Employees are no longer simply potential victims of phishing; some are strategic targets because of their position.
Ransomware Is Becoming More Economic
Criminals are optimizing attacks around the probability of successful extortion.
Preparation Reduces Psychological Leverage
Organizations that have already rehearsed ransomware scenarios are less likely to make chaotic decisions under pressure.
Zero Trust Can Reduce Blast Radius
A compromised employee account should not become a universal key to the enterprise.
Recovery Is Only Half the Battle
Restoring systems is essential, but organizations must also prevent stolen data from becoming a second crisis.
The Future of Ransomware Defense Is Organizational
The strongest defenses will increasingly combine technical controls with knowledge of business processes, employee roles, data flows, and decision-making structures.
The Biggest Lesson
The ransomware target is no longer simply the person who controls the server.
Increasingly, it is the person who understands the business well enough to make the company move.
✅ Manager-Level Targeting Is Supported
The
✅ The 146% Ransomware Increase Is Supported
Zscaler has publicly reported a 146% year-over-year increase in ransomware attacks blocked by its cloud platform, alongside a 70% increase in public extortion cases and a 92% increase in data-exfiltration volumes.
⚠️ The Demographic Pattern Needs Context
The reported 46-year-old average and concentration in business functions describe the observed sample; they should not be interpreted as proof that people of a particular age are inherently more likely to be attacked. The stronger conclusion is that established managers can possess valuable business access and influence.
Prediction
(+1) Business-Privilege Security Will Become Standard
Organizations are likely to expand privileged-access programs beyond administrators and begin identifying employees whose roles give them significant financial, operational, legal, or strategic influence.
(+1) Ransomware Reconnaissance Will Become More Sophisticated
As attackers become better at combining public information with stolen internal data, organizational mapping is likely to become a routine component of targeted extortion campaigns.
(+1) Identity Security Will Receive More Investment
Phishing-resistant authentication, conditional access, identity monitoring, segmentation, and least-privilege controls should become increasingly important as criminals focus on high-value employees.
(+1) Incident Response Will Become More Business-Centric
Companies will increasingly rehearse ransomware scenarios involving finance, HR, legal, operations, communications, and executive leadership rather than treating an attack solely as an IT emergency.
(-1) Ransomware Pressure Will Continue to Increase
The continued growth of extortion and data theft suggests that organizations should not expect ransomware to disappear. Instead, attackers are likely to become more selective, more intelligence-driven, and more focused on exploiting business decision-making.
(-1) One Compromised Employee Could Cause Broader Damage
As attackers deliberately search for people with cross-functional access and influence, a single compromised managerial identity could become substantially more valuable than a random employee account.
The Final Warning
The most important message from this research is not that CEOs are safe or that managers are uniquely vulnerable.
It is that the traditional definition of a high-value account is becoming outdated.
Cybercriminals are learning that the person who can approve a payment, understand a critical process, access sensitive records, influence an executive decision, or explain exactly what the company cannot afford to lose may be more useful than the person with the highest title.
Ransomware is no longer simply a battle over computers.
It is increasingly a battle over information, influence, decision-making, and human pressure.
And for organizations that still define privilege only by administrator rights, that shift could become one of the most expensive blind spots in cybersecurity.
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