AI‑enabled ransomware: a defense playbook for small teams

Ransomware in 2025: recover fast, don't posture Attackers are leaning on better lures and living‑off‑the‑land techniques; some groups even bypass EDR through unmanaged devices. The counter is boring and effective: least privilege, restore drills that actually run, and automatic isolation when encryption patterns trip. Day 0 - 1 playbook Detect anomalies in write rates and process behavior; isolate automatically. Rotate keys and revoke sessions. Restore from known‑good snapshots to an offline enclave, validate, then rejoin segments gradually. Keep legal, PR, and leadership on a pre‑agreed comms tree to avoid thrash. Controls that buy real time Hardware keys for admin accounts, immutable backup copies with quarterly restore tests, honeypot shares to catch lateral movement, and explicit enclave boundaries so everything doesn't fall at once. Human practice Table‑top exercises twice a year beat unread runbooks. Reward phishing reports; track response time like an SLO. The north star is hours‑to‑restore and verified data integrity. Reality from the last year Incident write‑ups in 2024/25 showed groups shifting to low‑volume, high‑impact campaigns and abusing unmanaged devices. Teams that survived best had pre‑approved isolation playbooks and had actually practiced restores on a calendar, not just on paper.