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As the ransomware industry evolves, experts are predicting hackers will only continue to find more and more ways of using the technology to exploit businesses and individuals.

Seksan Mongkhonkhamsao | Moment | Getty Images

Ransomware is now a billion-dollar industry. But it wasn’t always that large — nor was it a prevalent cybersecurity risk like it is today.

Dating back to the 1980s, ransomware is a form of malware used by cybercriminals to lock files on a person’s computer and demand payment to unlock them.

The technology — which officially turned 35 on Dec. 12 — has come a long way, with criminals now able to spin up ransomware much faster and deploy it across multiple targets.

Cybercriminals raked in $1 billion of extorted cryptocurrency payments from ransomware victims in 2023 — a record high, according to data from blockchain analysis firm Chainalysis.

Experts expect ransomware to continue evolving, with modern-day cloud computing tech, artificial intelligence and geopolitics shaping the future.

How did ransomware come about?

The first event considered to be a ransomware attack happened in 1989.

A hacker physically mailed floppy disks claiming to contain software that could help determine whether someone was at risk of developing AIDs.

However, when installed, the software would hide directories and encrypt file names on people’s computers after they’d rebooted 90 times.

It would then display a ransom note requesting a cashier’s check to be sent to an address in Panama for a license to restore the files and directories.

The program became known by the cybersecurity community as the “AIDs Trojan.” 

“It was the first ransomware and it came from someone’s imagination. It wasn’t something that they’d read about or that had been researched,” Martin Lee, EMEA lead for Talos, the cyber threat intelligence division of IT equipment giant Cisco, told CNBC in an interview.

“Prior to that, it was just never discussed. There wasn’t even the theoretical concept of ransomware.”

The perpetrator, a Harvard-taught biologist named Joseph Popp, was caught and arrested. However, after displaying erratic behavior, he was found unfit to stand trial and returned to the United States.

How ransomware has developed

Since the AIDs Trojan emerged, ransomware has evolved a great deal. In 2004, a threat actor targeted Russian citizens with a criminal ransomware program known today as “GPCode.”

The program was delivered to people via email — an attack method today commonly known as “phishing.” Users, tempted with the promise of an attractive career offer, would download an attachment which contained malware disguising itself as a job application form.

Once opened, the attachment downloaded and installed malware on the victim’s computer, scanning the file system and encrypting files and demanding payment via wire transfer.

Then, in the early 2010s, ransomware hackers turned to crypto as a method of payment.

Ransomware attacks could get worse next year, says TrustedSec's David Kennedy

In 2013, only a few years after the creation of bitcoin, the CryptoLocker ransomware emerged.

Hackers targeting people with this program demanded payment in either bitcoin or prepaid cash vouchers — but it was an early example of how crypto became the currency of choice for ransomware attackers.

Later, more prominent examples of ransomware attacks that selected crypto as the ransom payment method of choice included the likes of WannaCry and Petya.

“Cryptocurrencies provide many advantages for the bad guys, precisely because it is a way of transferring value and money outside of the regulated banking system in a way that is anonymous and immutable,” Lee told CNBC. “If somebody’s paid you, that payment can’t be rolled back.”

CryptoLocker also became notorious in the cybersecurity community as one of the earliest examples of a “ransomware-as-a-service” operation — that is, a ransomware service sold by developers to more novice hackers for a fee to allow them to carry out attacks.

“In the early 2010s, we have this increase in professionalization,” Lee said, adding that the gang behind CryptoLocker were “very successful in operating the crime.”

What’s next for ransomware?

'Fully acceptable' now that you have to use AI in your cyber defense, Darktrace's Mike Beck says

Some experts worry AI has lowered the barrier to entry for criminals looking to create and use ransomware. Generative AI tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT allow everyday internet users to insert text-based queries and requests and get sophisticated, humanlike answers in response — and many programmers are even using it to help them write code.

Mike Beck, chief information security officer of Darktrace, told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe” there’s a “huge opportunity” for AI — both in arming the cybercriminals and improving productivity and operations within cybersecurity companies.

“We have to arm ourselves with the same tools that the bad guys are using,” Beck said. “The bad guys are going to be using the same tooling that is being used alongside all that kind of change today.”

But Lee doesn’t think AI poses as severe a ransomware risk as many would think.

“There’s a lot of hypothesis about AI being very good for social engineering,” Lee told CNBC. “However, when you look at the attacks that are out there and clearly working, it tends to be the simplest ones that are so successful.”

Targeting cloud systems

A serious threat to watch out for in future could be hackers targeting cloud systems, which enable businesses to store data and host websites and apps remotely from far-flung data centers.

“We haven’t seen an awful lot of ransomware hitting cloud systems, and I think that’s likely to be the future as it progresses,” Lee said.

We could eventually see ransomware attacks that encrypt cloud assets or withhold access to them by changing credentials or using identity-based attacks to deny users access, according to Lee.

Geopolitics is also expected to play a key role in the way ransomware evolves in the years to come.

“Over the last 10 years, the distinction between criminal ransomware and nation-state attacks is becoming increasingly blurred, and ransomware is becoming a geopolitical weapon that can be used as a tool of geopolitics to disrupt organizations in countries perceived as hostile,” Lee said.

“I think we’re probably going to see more of that,” he added. “It’s fascinating to see how the criminal world could be co-opted by a nation state to do its bidding.”

Another risk Lee sees gaining traction is autonomously distributed ransomware.

“There is still scope for there to be more ransomwares out there that spread autonomously — perhaps not hitting everything in their path but limiting themselves to a specific domain or a specific organization,” he told CNBC.

Lee also expects ransomware-as-a-service to expand rapidly.

“I think we will increasingly see the ransomware ecosystem becoming increasingly professionalized, moving almost exclusively towards that ransomware-as-a-service model,” he said.

But even as the ways criminals use ransomware are set to evolve, the actual makeup of the technology isn’t expected to change too drastically in the coming years.

“Outside of RaaS providers and those leveraging stolen or procured toolchains, credentials and system access have proven to be effective,” Jake King, security lead at internet search firm Elastic, told CNBC.

“Until further roadblocks appear for adversaries, we will likely continue to observe the same patterns.”

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Tech stocks set for big losing week as AI names get rocked after Nvidia earnings

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Tech stocks set for big losing week as AI names get rocked after Nvidia earnings

Jensen Huang, NVIDIA founder and CEO, has a Q&A session at a press conference during the APEC CEO summit on October 31, 2025 in Gyeongju, South Korea.

Woohae Cho | Getty Images News | Getty Images

Even Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang couldn’t save the tech and artificial intelligence trade this week.

The chip giant’s talismanic leader trumpeted “off the charts” chip sales and dismissed talk of an “AI bubble,” and for a while, the tide lifted all boats.

“There’s been a lot of talk about an AI bubble,” Huang said during an earnings call this week. “From our vantage point, we see something very different.”

The buzz from the blowout report quickly reversed, sending the AI winners deeply into the red — and few beneficiaries were left unscathed.

Every member of the Magnificent 7, except for Alphabet, was tracking for a losing week, with Nvidia, Amazon and Microsoft staring down the biggest losses.

Amazon and Microsoft have led the group’s drop lower, falling about 6% this week. Meanwhile, Alphabet has gained nearly 8%. The search giant is also the only megacap of the group on pace for November gains thanks to a boost from the launch of Gemini 3.

Oracle, which is another major Nvidia customer, slumped about 10%. The chipmaker also supplies major model developers such as OpenAI and Anthropic.

Read more CNBC tech news

Chip stocks have also declined amid the broader tech market turmoil. Advanced Micro Devices and Micron were on pace for 17% losses. Marvell Technology has slumped about 10%. Quantum computing stocks Rigetti, IonQ and D-Wave have dropped at least 10%

CoreWeave, which buys and rents out Nvidia’s chips in data centers, initially soared on the chipmaker’s earnings report, but swiftly reversed course. The company’s stock is looking at an 8% blow this week.

AI fever was cooling in the runup to Nvidia’s earnings report on Wednesday, and investors looked to the print to alleviate fears that the AI bubble was on shaky ground. Since the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022, the stock has helped power the market to new all-time highs.

But concerns have mounted in recent weeks as tech stocks hit stretched valuations.

Major investors, including Bridgewater’s Ray Dalio told CNBC Thursday that the market is definitely in a bubble.

Much of the worries have stemmed from a boom in capital expenditures spending to support AI, with few signs of a payoff in view for many of the players.

Investor Michael Burry recently accused some of the biggest cloud and infrastructure providers of understating depreciation expenses and estimating a longer life cycle for their chips, calling it “one of the more common frauds of the modern era.”

Earlier this month, Burry revealed bets against Nvidia and Palantir.

Shares of the software analytics company, which supplies AI tools to the government and businesses, are down 11% this week. The stock has shed nearly a quarter of its value this month.

WATCH: Bridgewater founder Ray Dalio: We are definitely in a bubble, but that doesn’t mean you should sell

Bridgewater founder Ray Dalio: We are definitely in a bubble, but that doesn't mean you should sell

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Amazon cut thousands of engineers in its record layoffs, despite saying it needs to innovate faster

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Amazon cut thousands of engineers in its record layoffs, despite saying it needs to innovate faster

The Amazon Puget Sound Headquarters is pictured on Oct. 28, 2025 in Seattle, Washington.

Stephen Brashear | Getty Images

Amazon‘s 14,000-plus layoffs announced last month touched almost every piece of the company’s sprawling business, from cloud computing and devices to advertising, retail and grocery stores. But one job category bore the brunt of cuts more than others: engineers.

Documents filed in New York, California, New Jersey and Amazon’s home state of Washington showed that nearly 40% of the more than 4,700 job cuts in those states were engineering roles. The data was reported by Amazon in Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification, or WARN, filings to state agencies.

The figures represent a segment of the total layoffs announced in October. Not all data was immediately available because of differences in state WARN reporting requirements.

In announcing the steepest round of cuts in its 31-year history, Amazon joined a growing roster of tech companies that have slashed jobs this year even as cash piles have mounted and profits soared. In total, there have been almost 113,000 job cuts at 231 tech companies, according to Layoffs.fyi, continuing a trend that began in 2022 as businesses readjusted to life after the Covid pandemic.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has been on a multiyear mission to transform the company’s corporate culture into one that operates like what he calls “the world’s largest startup.” He’s looked to make Amazon leaner and less bureaucratic by urging staffers to do more with less and cutting organizational bloat.

Amazon is expected to carry out further job reductions in January, CNBC previously reported.

Andy Jassy, chief executive officer of Amazon.com Inc., speaks during an unveiling event in New York, US, on Wednesday, Feb. 26, 2025.

Michael Nagle | Bloomberg | Getty Images

The company said it’s also shifting resources to invest more in artificial intelligence. The technology is already poised to reshape Amazon’s white-collar workforce, with Jassy predicting in June that its corporate head count will shrink in the coming years alongside efficiency gains from AI.

Human resources chief Beth Galetti, in her memo announcing the layoffs, focused on the importance of innovating, which the company will now have to do with fewer people, specifically engineers.

“This generation of AI is the most transformative technology we’ve seen since the Internet, and it’s enabling companies to innovate much faster than ever before,” Galetti wrote. “We’re convinced that we need to be organized more leanly, with fewer layers and more ownership, to move as quickly as possible for our customers and business.”

Amazon said in a statement that AI is not the driver behind the vast majority of the job cuts, and that the bigger goal was to reduce bureaucracy and emphasize speed.

Jassy said on Amazon’s earnings call last month that the cuts were in response to a “culture” issue inside the company, spurred in part by an extended hiring spree that left it with “a lot more layers” and slower decision-making.

The layoffs impacted a mix of software engineer levels, but SDE II roles, or mid-level employees, were disproportionately affected, the WARN filings show.

The AI boom is making software development jobs harder to come by as companies adopt coding assistants or so-called vibe coding platforms from vendors like Cursor, OpenAI and Cognition. Amazon has released its own competitor called Kiro.

Read more CNBC tech news

‘Significant role reductions’

Amazon spends billions on AI arms race as it guts corporate ranks

Game designers, artists and producers made up more than a quarter of the total cuts in Irvine, and they were roughly 11% of staffers laid off at Amazon’s San Diego offices, according to filings.

The company also told staffers it’s halting much of its work on big-budget, or triple A, game development, specifically around massively multiplayer online, or MMO, games, Boom wrote. Amazon has released MMOs including Crucible and New World. It was also developing an MMO based on “Lord of the Rings.”

Beyond its gaming division, Amazon also significantly cut back its visual search and shopping teams, according to multiple employee posts on LinkedIn. The unit is responsible for products like Amazon Lens and Lens Live, AI shopping tools that enable users to find products via their camera in real time or images saved to their device. The company rolled out Lens Live in September.

The team was primarily based in Palo Alto, California, and Amazon’s WARN filings indicate that software engineers, applied scientists and quality assurance engineers were heavily impacted across its offices there.

Amazon’s online ad business, one of its biggest profit centers, was downsized as well. More than 140 ad sales and marketing roles were eliminated across Amazon’s New York offices, accounting for about 20% of the roughly 760 positions cut, according to state documents viewed by CNBC.

WATCH: Box joining AWS marketplace in new partnership

AI's impact on reshaping the workforce

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The market’s surprising reversal, Gap’s viral ad, AI regulation and more in Morning Squawk

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The market's surprising reversal, Gap's viral ad, AI regulation and more in Morning Squawk

Dado Ruvic | Reuters

This is CNBC’s Morning Squawk newsletter. Subscribe here to receive future editions in your inbox.

Here are five key things investors need to know to start the trading day:

1. Hero to zero

Stock investors didn’t end up getting the post-Nvidia earnings market bounce they hoped for. After opening yesterday’s trading session higher, stocks took a dramatic midday tumble, once again casting doubt on the artificial intelligence trade.

Here’s what to know:

  • Nvidia shares gave up their 5% post-earnings gain, ending the session down more than 3% despite the chipmaker’s blockbuster quarterly results and guidance. The AI darling’s stock is on track to finish the week down 5%.
  • The Dow Jones Industrial Average swung more than 1,100 between its session highs and lows. All three major averages closed solidly in the red, with the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite ending the day down 2.15%.
  • Meanwhile, the CBOE Volatility Index — better known as Wall Street’s fear gauge — ended the session at a level not seen since April.
  • Bitcoin fell to lows going back to April, further illustrating the shift away from risk assets.
  • Before stocks’ midday reversal, Bridgewater founder Ray Dalio told CNBC that “we are in that territory of a bubble,” but that you don’t need to sell stocks because of it.
  • The three major indexes are all on track to end the week in the red.
  • Follow live markets updates here.

2. Prediction market

A ‘Now Hiring’ sign is posted outside of a business on Oct. 3, 2025 in Miami, Florida.

Joe Raedle | Getty Images

The belated September jobs report was finally released yesterday, and the headline number was much hotter than economists expected with an increase of 119,000 jobs. On the other hand, the unemployment rate ticked up to 4.4%, its highest level since 2021.

The chance of a rate cut at the Federal Reserve’s next meeting remained low after the report, according to the CME FedWatch Tool. But the odds flipped this morning after New York Fed President John Williams said he sees “room for a further adjustment” in interest rates, reviving hopes of a December cut.

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3. Better than yours

Merchandise on display in a Gap store on November 21, 2024 in Miami Beach, Florida. 

Joe Raedle | Getty Images

Gap‘s “Milkshake” ad brought all the shoppers to the store. The retailer’s viral “Better in Denim” campaign with girl group Katseye helped drive comparable sales up 5% in its third quarter, beating analyst expectations.

The Old Navy and Banana Republic parent also surpassed Wall Street’s estimates on both the top and bottom lines, sending shares rising 4.5% in overnight trading. Athleta was the notable outlier, with the athleisure brand’s sales falling 11%.

Gap’s report comes at the end of a busy week for retail earnings. As CNBC’s Melissa Repko reports, one key theme of this quarter’s results has been that value-oriented retailers are winning favor with shoppers across income brackets.

4. AI in D.C.

U.S. President Donald Trump speaks in the Oval Office at the White House on Oct. 6, 2025 in Washington, DC.

Anna Moneymaker | Getty Images

The White House is putting together an executive order that would thwart states’ individual AI laws. A draft obtained by CNBC shows the order would focus on staging legal challenges and blocking federal funding for states to ensure their compliance.

The draft would work to the advantage of many AI industry leaders who have pushed back on a state-by-state approach to the technology’s regulation. A White House official told CNBC that any discussion around the draft is speculation until an official announcement.

Click here to read the full draft.

5. Flight fight

Courtesy: Archer Aviation

Joby Aviation is taking air taxi competitor Archer Aviation to court. In a lawsuit filed Wednesday, Joby accused Archer of using information stolen by a former employee to “one-up” a deal with a real estate developer.

Joby alleges that George Kivork, its former U.S. state and local policy lead, took files and information before jumping to the competitor in an act of “corporate espionage.” Archer called the case “baseless litigation” and said it’s “entirely without merit.”

The Daily Dividend

Here are our recommendations for stories to circle back to this weekend:

CNBC’s Liz Napolitano, Tasmin Lockwood, Melissa Repko, Jeff Cox, Sarah Min, Emily Wilkins, Mary Catherine Wellons and Samantha Subin contributed to this report. Josephine Rozzelle edited this edition.

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