It's why it's not worse - an ongoing threat means only small amount of systems are affected at a time, and there is time to develop countermeasures. An attack on everything all at once is much more damaging, especially when it eliminates fallback options - like the hospital that can't divert their patients because every other hospital in the country is down too, and so is 911.
Ransomware that affects only individual computers died not get payouts outside of hitting extremely incompetent orgs.
If you want actually good payout, your crypto locker has to either encrypt network filesystems, or infect crucial core systems (domain controllers, database servers, the filers directly, etc).
Ransomware getting smarter about sideways movement, and proper data exfiltration etc attacks, are part of what led to proliferation of requirements for EDRs like Crowdstrike, btw
Ransomware vendors at least try to avoid causing damage to critical infrastructure, or hitting way too many systems simultaneously - it's good neither for business nor for their prospects of staying alive and free.
But that's besides the point. Point is, attacks distributed over time and space ultimately make the overall system more resilient; an attack happening everywhere at once is what kills complex systems.
> Ransomware getting smarter about sideways movement, and proper data exfiltration etc attacks, are part of what led to proliferation of requirements for EDRs like Crowdstrike, btw
To use medical analogy, this is saying that the pathogens got smarter at moving around, the immune system got put on a hair trigger, leading to a cytokine storm caused by random chance, almost killing the patient. Well, hopefully our global infrastructure won't die. The ultimate problem here isn't pathogens (ransomware), but the oversensitive immune system (EDRs).
