Akira, ShinyHunters, and The Gentlemen:
Extortion Lessons From Early 2026

What factors have driven the top ransomware and extortion groups' success in early 2026? And how should organizations structure their defenses to protect against them?

Join hosts Alexandra and John as they discuss:

• How Akira is exploiting unknown assets inherited through M&A
• Why ShinyHunters' vishing and SaaS misconfiguration models work
• How The Gentlemen grew 588% quarter-over-quarter

Two questions your organization should be asking right now:

• Have you run a full asset discovery sweep on every environment inherited through acquisition in the last few years?
• Do you have automated containment rules in place for anomalous MFA device enrollment and EDR-killing behavior?

Resources: https://linktr.ee/ReliaQuestShadowTalk

John Dilgen: Cyber Threat Intelligence Analyst at ReliaQuest, where he specializes in researching cyber threats impacting ReliaQuest customers. With a strong technical background, he previously served as an Incident Response Analyst and Trainer at ReliaQuest.

Alexandra Moore: Manager of Threat Intelligence at ReliaQuest, where she leads intelligence analysis and customer dissemination to help organizations understand and respond to emerging cyber threats. Prior to this, she established and scaled monitoring across Russian-language cybercriminal platforms at Digital Shadows, building collection and analytical coverage to support digital risk protection capabilities.