Most ransomware playbooks don't address machine credentials. Attackers know it.

The gap between ransomware threats and the defenses meant to stop them is getting worse, not better. Ivanti’s 2026 State of Cybersecurity Report found that the preparedness gap widened by an average of 10 points year over year across every threat category the firm tracks. Ransomware hit the widest spread: 63% of security professionals rate it a high or critical threat, but just 30% say they are “very prepared” to defend against it. That’s a 33-point gap, up from 29 points a year ago.CyberArk’s 2025 Identity Security Landscape puts numbers to the problem: 82 machine identities for every human in organizations worldwide. Forty-two percent of those machine identities have privileged or sensitive access. The most authoritative playbook framework has the same blind spotGartner’s ransomware prep