SECTION 03
Ransomware Geography:
Europe's Hardest Hit Regions
A Regional Perspective of Ransomware in Europe
Europe's Four Regional Clusters
*Nordics covers Denmark, Finland, Sweden and Norway; Iceland sits outside the report's 31-country scope and is not included.
In the European context, regions matter as organisations and their suppliers operate across neighbouring markets rather than within single borders, thus a regional perspective reflects how exposure clusters more closely than 31 separate country counts. France, Italy and Spain are kept as a group of their own for a different reason. None of them belongs to a tight cross-border cluster the way the DACH or Benelux countries do. Grouping them by scale rather than geography keeps the biggest national markets visible alongside the regional clusters, instead of scattering them through a list of single countries.
To avoid misleading representation and exhibit the actual weight of regions in Europe's ransomware map, we created another group consisting of France, Italy and Spain. This group is a smaller version of the Big Five, excluding the UK and Germany, which belong to UK-Ireland and DACH respectively. This group with DACH together account for close to six in ten European incidents.
The regional concentration is structural, not a passing snapshot. The regions that lead the overall total also lead in every individual period.
Next: See which sectors are most at risk.
Two industries absorb nearly half of all European incidents, but they're exposed in completely different ways.