‘As British businesses expand their use of cloud infrastructure and AI tools, they are also reshaping their risk landscape,’ says cyber portfolio manager
Ransomware incidents are projected to rise by 40% from 2025 to 2026, as cybercriminals target vulnerabilities in cloud infrastructure and artificial intelligence (AI) tools, according to QBE’s latest cyber report, Cloud cover: forecasting digital disruption in a cybercrime climate.
Published in October 2025, the insurer’s analysis, conducted with consultancy Control Risks, showed that the yearly number of ransomware victims publicly named on leak sites is expected to increase from 5,010 in 2024 to over 7,000 in 2026. This represents a fivefold rise compared to the total in 2020.
QBE found that the UK alarmingly accounted for 10% of all major cyber incidents globally over the past two years, with 49 significant events recorded.
Government, IT and telecoms remain among the most aggressively targeted sectors, representing 37% of total incidents between August 2023 and August 2025.
David Warr, cyber portfolio manager at QBE, said: “As British businesses expand their use of cloud infrastructure and AI tools, they are also reshaping their risk landscape. The challenge is not just preparing for the future but catching up with exposures that have evolved at speed.
“The supply chain threat causes concern for companies. While outsourcing certain parts of your business can create efficiencies and cost savings, there are security considerations to bear in mind. Each outsourced provider that connects into your company creates an additional layer of risk – not only in terms of potential malware transmission but also in terms of critical dependencies.”
Targeting the cloud
The report came just before the Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage, which caused global turmoil among thousands of sites, including some of the web’s most popular apps like Snapchat and Reddit.
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QBE highlighted that half of the world’s data will be stored in the cloud by 2025, up from 10% in 2015, making cloud platforms an increasingly attractive target for attackers.
High-severity cloud alerts rose 235% in 2024 compared with the previous year, while ransomware incidents nearly tripled year-on-year, from 572 in the first quarter of 2024 to 1,537 in the same period of 2025.
QBE also urgently warned that deepfakes were involved in nearly 10% of successful cyber attacks in 2024, with each attack causing losses ranging from £206,000 ($250,000) to £16.5m ($20m).
The insurer cautioned that generative AI (GenAI) is lowering the technical barriers for criminals, enabling them to automate phishing, identity fraud and extortion campaigns. In 2025, 78% of organisations deployed AI in at least one business function, up from 55% the previous year, while ChatGPT’s global user base grew to 755 million.
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