What is ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS)?

Ransomware-as-a-Service is a criminal business model in which operators develop and maintain ransomware and lease it to affiliates, who carry out attacks and share the proceeds. RaaS has dramatically lowered the skill required to launch attacks and accelerated the pace at which new variants appear.

This is why signature-based defenses struggle to keep up. Elastio’s zero-day detection uses an ensemble of models trained on more than 2,300 ransomware families and 10,000 variants, so it can detect novel RaaS payloads that have no published signature.

Last updated May 27, 2026