UK tops Europe's ransomware target list as five groups take 60% of attacks, new Cyble report finds

Manufacturing and construction overtake financial services; British aerospace firm and European Space Agency among Q1 victims 

LONDON— April 22, 2026 — The United Kingdom was the most-attacked country in Europe for ransomware in the first quarter of 2026, according to the Europe Threat Landscape Report: Q1 2026 published today by Cyble. Across the region, Cyble Research and Intelligence Labs (CRIL) recorded 462 major cyber incidents between January and March, including 404 ransomware attacks, 51 data breaches, and seven listings for the sale of compromised network access. 

The report’s central finding is the degree to which both the ransomware market and the underground market for initial access have consolidated. Five ransomware groups — Qilin, The Gentlemen, Akira, NightSpire, and LockBit — were collectively responsible for approximately 60% of the 404 ransomware attacks observed across Europe in the quarter. Qilin alone claimed 87 attacks, more than one in five of the total. On the dark web, two brokers — known as tamnaamm and algoyim — accounted for 71% of all observed sales of compromised access into European organisations. 

For the past four years CISOs have been told that ransomware is an ecosystem of thousands of actors and that defence is a game of chance,” said Kaustubh Medhe, CTO & VP – Research and Threat Intelligence of Cyble. “This quarter’s data shows the opposite. Five groups and two access brokers are driving the majority of the activity hitting Europe. That gives security leaders something they haven’t had: a short, named list of adversaries to prioritise detection engineering, threat hunts, and board-level briefings against.” 

The report also documents a pronounced shift in sector targeting. Manufacturing and construction were the two most-attacked sectors, displacing financial services. Cyble attributes this to a deliberate adversary calculation: manufacturers and construction firms carry narrow operational tolerance for downtime, which shortens the time between intrusion and ransom payment. 

“Threat groups have worked out where the pressure point is,” added Kaustubh. “A factory that loses three days of production faces contract penalties, supply-chain breakage, and in some cases existential loss. Banks have mature incident response, cyber insurance, and regulators watching. Adversaries are price-discriminating on willingness to pay, and the data shows it is working.” 

Key findings from the report 

• 462 cyber incidents observed across Europe in Q1 2026, including 404 ransomware attacks, 51 data breaches and leaks, and seven initial-access sales. 

• Qilin was the most active ransomware group, responsible for 87 incidents (over 21% of all ransomware activity), followed by The Gentlemen (58), Akira (42), NightSpire (27), and LockBit (26). 

• Manufacturing and construction were the most-targeted sectors, overtaking financial services. 

• The United Kingdom was the most-attacked country for ransomware in the quarter, followed by Germany, Italy, and France, separated by single-digit margins. 

• A UK aeronautical fabrication firm was breached by Interlock Group on 6 January, with aerospace drawings and employee contract data claimed as exfiltrated. 

• The European Space Agency was compromised on 8 January by a threat actor operating as “888”, with the group targeting collaborative engineering servers used by the scientific community. 

• A database containing the personal records of 5,851,232 French diploma holders was advertised for sale on a cybercrime forum. 

• A critical zero-day in Ivanti Endpoint Manager Mobile (CVE-2026-1340, CVSS 9.8) was weaponised shortly after disclosure; CRIL attributes exploitation activity to nation-state actors including Sandworm / APT28. Separate critical flaws in Dell RecoverPoint (CVE-2026-22769, CVSS 10.0) and Cisco Secure Firewall Management Centre (CVE-2026-20131) were also observed in active exploitation. 

• Pro-Russian hacktivist collectives, most notably NoName057(16), have extended their activity from DDoS campaigns into claimed administrative access to Industrial Control Systems, including water treatment and supply, heating plants, and a mini-hydroelectric facility. UK government and airport websites were among the targets of the DDoS campaigns. 

• Sustained nation-state espionage continued, with the Salt Typhoon campaign targeting telecommunications providers globally. 

What this means for UK and European CISOs 

Cyble’s guidance to security leaders reading the report is to treat Q1 2026 as an opportunity to narrow the defensive aperture. A short adversary list allows organisations to align detection coverage, tabletop exercises, and insurer conversations against a specific set of groups rather than a diffuse threat surface. Manufacturers and construction firms — together with their downstream supply chains — should assume they are above-baseline targets, and should accelerate OT/IT segmentation reviews, back-up restoration testing, and patch programmes for edge infrastructure. Organisations running Ivanti EPMM, Dell RecoverPoint, or Cisco Secure Firewall Management Centre should treat this quarter’s CVEs as priority-one remediation. 

The report arrives ahead of the UK Cyber Security and Resilience Bill and against the backdrop of NIS2 enforcement across the EU, both of which place sharper obligations on operators of essential services — precisely the sectors most heavily targeted in the quarter.