Initial Access Brokers (IABs) are the middlemen of the modern ransomware economy — specialists who break into corporate networks and resell that access to ransomware operators. We break down the marketplaces, the pricing tiers, the dominant brokers of 2026, and how to disrupt the chain.
Jesse William McGraw
Jesse William McGraw
Jesse William McGraw, also known as GhostExodus, is a former insider threat and threat actor. He became the first person in recent U.S. history to be convicted of corrupting industrial control systems. Today he focuses on threat intelligence, OSINT, and public speaking, using his knowledge to bring awareness to the security risks that organisations and individuals face.
Remote Desktop Protocol remains the single most-abused initial-access vector for ransomware operators in 2026. We break down the current attack patterns — credential stuffing, broker-sold access, BlueKeep-era CVE echoes, and weaponised RDS misconfigurations — and the controls that actually move the needle.
Managed service providers entered 2026 as the single highest-leverage target class in the ransomware economy. Why the channel is now the front line, which TTPs operators are running against MSPs specifically, and what the better-run shops have already changed.
Through 2024 and 2025 a quiet rebalancing happened: password-phishing fell, session-cookie theft via infostealers surged, and “we have MFA” stopped meaning what defenders thought it meant. A 2026 field guide to the technique and the controls that actually answer it.
A 2026 attribution playbook for ransomware investigations — combining TTP fingerprinting against MITRE ATT&CK, ransom-note artifact analysis, leak-site monitoring, and the open-source intelligence pivots that hold up under scrutiny.
A 2026 practitioner walkthrough of Active Directory hardening against the lateral-movement, credential-theft, and persistence techniques that modern ransomware operators rely on — Tier 0 isolation, DSRM rotation, PRT theft mitigation, and AD audit baselines.
A 2026 self-doxxing tutorial — run the same OSINT tools attackers use, on yourself, to find every account, leaked credential, and broker entry tied to your identity. With remediation steps for each finding.
An executive-level explainer of double extortion — the dominant ransomware playbook in 2026 — covering how it works, why backups don’t fully defeat it, and the policy choices boards now have to make in the first hour of an incident.
A practitioner’s step-by-step tutorial for hardware-key MFA in 2026. Which YubiKey to buy, how to enroll it on Google, Microsoft, GitHub, AWS, and your password manager, plus the recovery-key gotcha that locks people out.
A practical 2026 walkthrough for removing your name, address, and phone from the major data broker sites — using DeleteMe, Optery, and the manual fallback for the holdouts.