AI vs RaaS: Defending Against Russia’s “Safe Haven”

Ransomware groups aren’t slowing down—they’re getting better at staying hard to kill. Recorded Future tracked at least 192 new ransomware variants from May–Dec 2024, then 236 more from Jan–Sep 2025. That isn’t “innovation.” It’s industrial cloning: leaked builders, rebrands, and copycat operations designed to keep the pipeline full even when law enforcement knocks down infrastructure.

Here’s the uncomfortable part for defenders: Russia no longer looks like a simple “safe haven,” but it’s not a clean break either. It’s closer to a managed market—selective crackdowns on expendable enablers (cash-out services, hosting providers that become politically noisy), while higher-utility operators and talent hubs often stay insulated. If your security strategy assumes enforcement will drain the swamp for you, you’re budgeting for disappointment.

This is where AI in cybersecurity earns its keep. When adversaries decentralize comms, rotate malware families, and recruit via semi-closed circles, you don’t win with one more signature or one more dashboard. You win with AI-driven threat detection that spots patterns across identity, endpoints, network traffic, and behavior—fast enough to matter.

Russia’s cybercrime ecosystem is “controlled,” not chaotic

The key shift described in Dark Covenant 3.0 is simple: Russia’s relationship with cybercriminals has moved from tolerance to management. That means arrests and seizures can happen—especially after international pressure—but outcomes and targets look selective.

Operation Endgame (with major actions in May 2024 and May 2025) hit the ransomware supply chain hard: loader malware, botnets, and money movement services. Russian authorities responded with visible actions against certain facilitators—think payment rails and laundering nodes—while alleged senior operators tied to major ransomware ecosystems often appear to face less decisive domestic pressure.

This “controlled impunity” creates a predictable pattern defenders should plan around:

• Cash-out and infrastructure enablers become expendable when they’re diplomatically costly.
• High-skill operator circles keep breathing if they deliver state value (intelligence access, influence, plausible deniability).
• Underground trust fractures as actors wonder who’s protected, who’s being sacrificed, and who’s compromised.

For security teams, the practical takeaway is blunt: your risk won’t decline just because headlines say “takedown.” It shifts. The actors adapt. The ecosystem reroutes.

The “safe haven” myth is still dangerous—just for a different reason

The old myth was “Russia protects everyone.” The new reality is worse for defenders because it’s more functional: Russia protects selectively, which encourages threat actors to optimize for protection.

You can see that in reported underground behaviors:

• tighter affiliate vetting
• increased deposits (collateral) to join programs
• more closed communications platforms
• explicit targeting carve-outs (CIS and, increasingly, BRICS-aligned boundaries)

A managed ecosystem doesn’t eliminate ransomware. It professionalizes it.

RaaS keeps adapting—so detection has to pivot from malware to behavior

Ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) survives pressure by shifting the parts that are easiest to swap: branding, builders, affiliates, and comms channels. That’s why the explosion of variants doesn’t correlate to an explosion of capability. It correlates to an explosion of packaging.

If you rely on static indicators, you’re playing whack-a-mole against packaging.

Behavior-based detection is the only strategy that scales:

• credential access and lateral movement patterns
• unusual directory traversal and data staging
• bursts of SMB/RDP activity across atypical hosts
• privilege escalation sequences that match human tradecraft
• exfiltration patterns that don’t care what the malware is named

This is where machine learning models (used responsibly) outperform manual triage. Humans are great at judgment. They’re terrible at watching millions of small events and noticing the one sequence that “rhymes” with last month’s intrusion.

What AI can actually do better than a rules-only SOC

AI isn’t magic. But it is excellent at three things RaaS forces you to do:

1. Detect weak signals across multiple data sources (endpoint + network + identity + email).
2. Generalize across rebrands (same playbook, different tooling).
3. Prioritize response when volume spikes (alert clustering, entity risk scoring, incident stitching).

A practical example: when a ransomware crew changes its encryptor, your antivirus signatures might miss it. But if your system recognizes the sequence—new service creation, credential dumping behavior, rapid remote execution, data staging to unusual paths—it can still flag the intrusion early.

That’s the real promise of AI-driven cybersecurity tools: durable detection when names and hashes change.

Operation Endgame showed where attackers will reroute next

Operation Endgame focused on the ransomware supply chain—loaders, botnets, and money services. The follow-on effect wasn’t just technical disruption. It reshaped trust and recruitment.

Recorded Future observed fewer open, credible RaaS affiliate ads in major forums, alongside continued launches of new programs (at least 21 new open RaaS affiliate programs since May 2024). That combination matters: open recruitment doesn’t disappear—it becomes the “edge market,” while mature crews move private.

Trust collapse is now a security signal you can exploit

Affiliates complaining about scams, impersonators recycling victim lists, and forum paranoia aren’t just crime-drama details. They create operational friction—and friction produces mistakes.

Defenders can capitalize by monitoring for the effects of that friction inside their own environments:

• more reliance on credential theft (faster entry, less bespoke work)
• heavier use of living-off-the-land binaries (reduces malware footprint)
• more aggressive time pressure tactics (24/48/72-hour escalation)
• increased exfil-only extortion attempts (when encryption is riskier)

AI-based anomaly detection helps here because the attacker’s constraints show up as patterns: faster execution, reduced dwell time, noisier privilege escalation.

“Decentralized comms” increases detection opportunities

Threat actors moving from Telegram to Session/Jabber/Tox and layering Tor/Tails/Qubes is meant to reduce surveillance. It also increases complexity and failure modes.

From a defender perspective, you don’t need to break their encryption to win. You need to detect what they do to your systems.

AI-assisted telemetry analysis can spot:

• endpoint behaviors consistent with remote tooling and staging
• unusual DNS/DoH patterns tied to novel infrastructure
• repeated authentication anomalies across identity providers
• data movement patterns (internal + outbound) that don’t fit normal business workflows

The point: decentralization hides comms, not intrusion tradecraft.

A practical AI defense blueprint for ransomware in 2026

Most companies get stuck buying tools instead of building a detection loop. Here’s what I’ve found works when ransomware crews are adapting faster than quarterly control reviews.

1) Train detection around the ransomware chain, not the ransomware brand

Your detections should map to stages:

• Initial access (phishing, exploited vulnerabilities)
• Credential access (dumping, token theft)
• Lateral movement (RDP/SMB/remote exec)
• Privilege escalation and persistence
• Data staging and exfiltration
• Encryption and impact

AI helps by learning “normal” per user, per host, per subnet—then ranking deviations by risk.

2) Make identity your early-warning system

Ransomware operations increasingly look like identity incidents first.

Deploy ML-driven analytics for:

• impossible travel and suspicious session chaining
• new admin role assignments
• unusual OAuth app consent patterns
• spikes in failed logins followed by success from new endpoints

If you only look for encryption, you’re already late.

3) Automate containment decisions you’ve already approved

The fastest ransomware response is the one you don’t argue about mid-incident.

Pre-authorize playbooks for high-confidence detections:

• isolate endpoint
• disable account + revoke sessions
• block outbound to newly observed destinations
• snapshot forensic artifacts

AI-driven SOC automation is most valuable when it compresses response time from hours to minutes.

4) Measure what matters: time-to-detect and time-to-contain

Attackers are compressing negotiation windows with 24–72-hour escalation tactics. Your metrics should reflect that.

Track:

• Median time-to-detect suspicious lateral movement
• Median time-to-disable compromised identities
• Time from exfil behavior to containment
• Percentage of “stitched” incidents vs isolated alerts

If those numbers aren’t improving, your tooling may be modern but your process isn’t.

What leaders should take from Dark Covenant 3.0

The best one-liner from this research is also the most actionable:

Russia isn’t a blanket safe haven. It’s a managed market where state interests decide who gets protected.

That has two consequences for enterprises:

1. Expect persistence. Takedowns create turbulence, not peace.
2. Assume adversaries will keep rebranding. Your detection must survive name changes.

The 2024 ransomware revenue estimate of $813.55 million (down 35% from 2023) suggests pressure is working financially. But the rise in victim postings, re-extortion, and recycled data shows attackers are compensating with volume and intimidation. They’re not exiting the business—they’re changing the tactics.

AI in cybersecurity fits this moment because it’s designed for moving targets: anomaly detection, predictive risk scoring, automated triage, and response orchestration.

If you want fewer ransomware disasters in 2026, focus less on whether a group gets arrested and more on whether you can stop the intrusion before it becomes a negotiation.

What would change in your security program if you measured success as “containment before exfiltration,” not “recovery after encryption?”