How does ransomware spread?

After gaining a foothold, ransomware spreads through lateral movement: harvesting credentials, abusing remote management tools, exploiting network shares, and using legitimate administrative utilities to reach additional hosts. Self-propagating variants can also exploit unpatched vulnerabilities to move automatically.

The goal is to reach high-value data and connected backups before encrypting. Because spread often touches shared and backup storage, Elastio inspects across live, replicated, and backup data to determine the full blast radius of an attack.