Beyond the ransom: 5 key insights from the 2026 TELUS Canadian Ransomware Study

In 2022, TELUS Business launched our first cybersecurity study, based on data collected in 2021. It focused on the impact of ransomware on Canadian organizations during an unprecedented global pandemic. Since then, ransomware has evolved but remains rampant. To share an updated perspective on ransomware in Canada, we partnered with IDC Canada to survey over 500 IT decision-makers and influencers across the country. Our latest study – the 2026 TELUS Canadian Ransomware Study – has just launched and we’re excited to share five key insights the study uncovered to help your organization align its cyber resilience strategy to this new operational reality.

Note: All statistics referenced in this article are drawn from the 2026 TELUS Canadian Ransomware Study.

For Canadian IT and security leaders, ransomware has become an ongoing operational reality – 85% of Canadian organizations reported experiencing at least one ransomware incident in the past 12 months. This reflects an 18% increase over the last four years.

As the volume of attacks has gone up, threat tactics have evolved. Adversaries are leveraging AI-enabled ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) models to deploy low-effort, high-volume campaigns at scale, shifting the landscape significantly over the last few years.

There is a common assumption that the primary financial impact of a ransomware attack is the ransom itself. However, data from the study shows that the ransom payment accounts for an average of only 18% of the total direct cost of an incident.

The remaining 82% of the financial impact is driven by other recovery and operational expenses:

Comparing this to data from our last ransomware study, organizations have generally become more experienced at budgeting for direct incident costs. However, a notable segment still underestimates recovery expenses, specifically when it comes to incident response and data recovery costs, potentially leading to significant unplanned expenditures.

Canadian organizations have become more transparent about their experiences, with the number of respondents uncomfortable disclosing whether they paid a ransom dropping from 35% in 2021 to just 5% today. For those who did share, 48% stated their organization paid the ransom, representing a slight 4% increase.

However, the biggest shift is in how organizations engage with threat actors and the subsequent outcomes:

While outcomes have improved, the data underscores that non-payers still maintain the fastest overall recovery timelines. Relying on slow or buggy decryption tools often introduces more operational bottlenecks than pivoting directly to properly tested and maintained offline backups.

An additional change that surfaced upon comparing findings from our last study is the frequency of repeat incidents after a business has recovered. Thirty-nine per cent of Canadian organizations report being reinfected by the same ransomware attack after initial recovery. This represents a 2.5x increase in reinfection.

This trend suggests there is a gap in the remediation phase. When teams focus primarily on resolving the immediate, obvious symptoms of an attack to bring systems back online quickly, they may pass on doing a thorough root cause analysis. Failing to find the original entry point or eliminate back doors left behind created the potential for threat actors to execute a repeat compromise.

Tracking how threat actors gain access helps organizations understand where their defences may need to be revisited. Technical vulnerabilities (including known flaws and zero-day exploits) remain the top attack vector in Canada at 45%, followed closely by email phishing links or attachments at 42%. With AI enabling threat actors to find and exploit vulnerabilities faster, we expect that technical vulnerabilities will continue to be a leading attack vector, increasing the need for modern, exposure management programs.

The most notable change, however, is the rise of unauthorized internal risks with the surge in shadow IT. It has become the third most common delivery mechanism at 36%. Interestingly, this was the least common entry point four years ago. As digital transformation projects and unvetted generative AI tools enter workplaces rapidly, shadow IT has grown into a greater challenge for modern security teams.

Ongoing digital transformation efforts have caused the average number of deployed endpoints (laptops, servers, IoT devices) to grow by 29%, rapidly expanding the attack surface internal teams must monitor. Because threat actors operate 24/7, organizations have tried to keep pace, but many internal teams are left stretched thin.

Organizations running their own internal 24/7 active monitoring logged the slowest recovery times, averaging 11.4 days. This suggests that while internal teams are "always on," they are frequently "always overwhelmed" due to a lack of specialized tooling or depth of staff.

Conversely, organizations that fully outsourced threat monitoring to a Managed Security Services Provider (MSSP) recovered an average of 1.3 days faster (10.2 days vs 11.4 days). This suggests that partnering with outside experts can help reduce response and recovery timelines by roughly 29 hours, providing an 11% speed advantage over going it alone. This can make a big difference in how fast you’re able to return to business as usual and minimize the impact of revenue lost during down time.

Comparing data between 2021 and today makes one thing clear: defending your organization can no longer be just about attempting to achieve absolute prevention. Instead, modern operating environments require a cyber resilience model which assumes an incident will occur and properly aligns your people, processes, and technology to withstand and recover from an incident efficiently.

By investing in proactive exposure management, continuously testing response playbooks, and balancing internal context with trusted managed security partners, Canadian businesses can better adapt to the evolving threat landscape.