The Gentlemen (tracked as Storm-2697) is a ransomware group that extorts organizations by encrypting and leaking stolen data.
Comparitech counted 2,627 ransomware attacks claimed in Q3 2026, a quarterly record up 27% on Q2 and 61% on a year earlier. Victims have confirmed 247 of those claims, so the record is mostly a count of what the gangs themselves assert.
Reality
Azazel, a Russian-speaking affiliate of The Gentlemen RaaS crew, ran his own leak site to extort over two dozen victims and kept the proceeds, CloudSEK found. His way in was secrets left in old GitLab commits.
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NCC Group counted 1,073 ransomware attacks in August, a second straight 2026 high and 12% above July. Industrial companies took 31% of them, up from 28% in July, so the hardest-hit sector drew a larger slice of a larger total.
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Cisco Talos's weekly newsletter says the newest models add only incremental cybersecurity capability, and that defensive use has not kept up with the ones already shipped.
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Intel 471's 18-month sweep of the underground counted 340 financial-sector extortion victims across 74 countries, 159 firms with access for sale and 562 claimed DDoS attacks. The dated intrusions came in through vendors and help-desk calls.
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Comparitech's half-year tally shows government ransomware growing again, with the newest crew on the board, The Gentlemen, out-filing Qilin and spreading its targeting well beyond the United States.
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The Gentlemen gave the Houston hospital operator nine days to pay after an August 31 filing confirmed patient, employee and provider files were taken, and a class action had already landed on August 27.
Perspective Coverage
3 publishersReality
Bitdefender puts 84% of its high-severity incidents on binaries that were already installed on the host. That figure and Microsoft's ClickFix number cover the two largest volume plays in the telemetry, and both sit outside what attachment scanning and patch cycles reach.
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Bitdefender logged 873 claimed ransomware victims in July, the third-highest month in a year. A brand that barely existed in June supplied 46 of them, on a leak site the analysts say they cannot fully verify.
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