This file enumerates what a "publicly disclosed ransomware attacks" figure — the basis of 25-1210b, 25-1230 and every ransomware total in this database — cannot include.
One: Victims Who Paid Before Publication
A leak-site listing exists to apply pressure. An organisation that pays during negotiation is generally never listed, so the counts systematically exclude successful extortion.
Which produces an uncomfortable inversion: the more effective an extortion operation is at extracting payment, the less of its activity appears in the statistics used to measure it.
Two: Attacks That Were Stopped
Pakistan Petroleum detected and isolated on the day, at 25-0807. Princeton ejected an intruder within 24 hours, at 25-1026. Neither is a ransomware statistic anywhere.
This desk filed at 25-0807 that a corpus assembled from disclosures records failures in detail and successes almost never. The totals inherit that: they count the incidents that got far enough to be worth publishing.
Three: Groups That Do Not Run Leak Sites
Not every operation publishes victims. Some encrypt without exfiltration and have nothing to leak; some prefer quiet negotiation; some are too small to maintain infrastructure.
The fragmentation file at 25-1226 recorded 73 new brands in one year, and a new brand’s first act is usually to establish a leak site — which means the counts may over-represent new entrants and under-represent quiet operators.
Four: Jurisdictions The Trackers Do Not Cover
The four filters at 25-0502 — mandatory disclosure, collective redress, a research industry, publication in English — shape which incidents anyone records. The regional files at 25-1116 and 25-0709 found leak sites functioning as the primary public record precisely where disclosure is not mandatory.
What That Leaves
A count of attacks that failed to extract payment, succeeded far enough to matter, were conducted by groups that advertise, against organisations in jurisdictions researchers watch.
That is a real and useful population. It is not "ransomware attacks in 2025", and every file in this corpus that quotes such a total — including this desk’s own — should be read with the four exclusions attached.
It describes structural exclusions in the incident counts used throughout this database. Sources below support the totals it examines. Corrections: corrections@forensicpost.com.
- Record number of ransomware victims and groups in 2025Infosecurity Magazine
- Ransomware in healthcare: the attack timelineCybelAngel