South Africa's Ransomware Landscape in 2026

South African organisations continued to appear in ransomware reporting during 2026. The individual incidents differ, but the recurring lesson is consistent: organisations need to prepare for both system disruption and data theft. A resilient organisation maintains tested backups, strong identity controls, patching, monitoring and a rehearsed recovery process. For smaller organisations, the most important step is to ensure that critical data exists in a backup that cannot simply be encrypted alongside the production environment.