Play is a cybercrime syndicate known for ransomware attacks against governments and businesses. Their ransomware is more than just another headline—it’s one of the most relentless and damaging cyber threats in recent years. As of 2025, more than 900 organizations across North America, Europe, and South America—spanning critical sectors such as retail, healthcare, and financial services—have fallen victim to Play’s double-extortion tactics that cripple both data and virtual infrastructure.
This group’s sophistication with exfiltrating sensitive data, encrypting VMware vSphere environments, and targeting identity systems underscores a harsh reality: prevention alone is no longer enough.
And that taking Play very seriously.
Inside the Playbook
Since emerging in mid-2022, the Play ransomware group (also known as Playcrypt) has evolved into one of the most destructive and adaptive ransomware operations in the wild. Unlike earlier attacks that relied on basic encryption and ransom notes, Play executes with precision—combining data theft, identity compromise, double extortion, and hypervisor-level disruption to paralyze organizations and maximize pressure.
Play’s operators don’t just encrypt data: they also target identity infrastructure early. For instance, they deploy tools like Grixba to map Active Directory and enumerate privileged accounts, and use legitimate Active Directory utilities such as AdFind to gather domain details. Once inside, they often pivot via compromised credentials and push the attack broadly across the network, leveraging trust relationships to propagate laterally.
After reconnaissance, Play executes its encryption phase. The group deploys an AES-RSA hybrid encryptor, (often using intermittent encryption) encrypting only portions of each file to accelerate execution and evade detection. For organizations running VMware vSphere, the impact can be catastrophic. Play’s ESXi variant disables virtual machines and encrypts hypervisor files, effectively shutting down entire environments within minutes.
Adding to the chaos, the group uses legitimate tools such as PowerShell, PsExec, WinRAR, and Cobalt Strike to blend in with normal IT operations and disable endpoint protection before encryption begins. Victims are then directed to contact custom @gmx.de or @web.de addresses or even receive phone calls threatening public data release.
In short: Play ransomware turns your own infrastructure against you—and traditional prevention tools can’t keep up.
Even the best security stacks—next-gen firewalls, EDR, SIEM—can struggle against Play. The attackers use legitimate tools, log deletion, lateral movement through identity systems, and hypervisor targeting to reduce the window for detection and recovery to mere minutes.
Signature-based antivirus and SIEM solutions often remain blind until it’s too late. Modern security strategies now recognize that recovery is an essential part of defense.
Rubrik: Purpose-Built to Defeat Ransomware Like Play
When prevention fails, recovery must prevail. Rubrik delivers a unified cyber recovery platform engineered to ensure business continuity—no matter how severe the attack.
Here’s how Rubrik helps organizations defeat Play ransomware and restore operations quickly and confidently:
1. Immutable Backups: Your Untouchable Data Fortress
Rubrik backups can’t be altered or encrypted, not even by an admin with compromised credentials. That means when Play strikes, you have a clean, tamper-proof copy of your data to restore from.
2. Sensitive Data Monitoring: Shrinking Extortion Leverage
Rubrik continuously maps where your sensitive data lives (PII, PHI, financial records) and who has access. This visibility helps you reduce your exposure and focus on restoring what’s critical first.
3. Identity Resilience: Restoring Trust in AD and Entra ID
Play often hijacks identity systems to spread laterally. Rubrik’s Identity Resilience detects unauthorized changes in Active Directory or Entra ID, allows rollbacks, and restores a clean identity foundation, preventing attackers from using credentials as backdoors.
4. AI-Driven Anomaly Detection
Rubrik uses AI-driven anomaly detection to catch subtle encryption patterns, even Play’s intermittent encryption that most systems miss. This helps identify the blast radius and ensures only clean snapshots are used in restoration.
5. Hunt. Quarantine. Recover
Enriched by Rubrik Zero Labs and Mandiant, Rubrik continuously scans backup data for malware, IoCs, and YARA rules. Analysts can even perform “Turbo Threat Hunts” across thousands of backups in seconds to locate and quarantine compromised data before recovery.
6. Orchestrated Cyber Recovery
Once clean snapshots are identified, Rubrik automates mass recovery of virtual machines and data, restoring business services in minutes while validating each restored system against known threat indicators.
Aligned with Global Cyber Defense Guidance
Rubrik’s approach aligns directly with CISA/FBI/ACSC advisory AA23-352A, emphasizing:
Immutable, offline backups
Practiced and validated recovery
Multi-factor authentication and least-privilege administration
Continuous identity hygiene
Rubrik turns those recommendations into reality, operationalizing them in a single, automated platform designed for speed, safety, and assurance.
From Extortion to Restoration
Play ransomware is relentless—but it’s not unstoppable. Organizations that combine immutable data protection with identity-aware recovery can outlast even the most advanced adversaries.
Rubrik empowers security and IT teams to move from reaction to resilience, eliminating the need to negotiate with attackers and enabling confident, fast restoration.
Want to see exactly how Rubrik defeats Play ransomware step-by-step?
Download the full technical whitepaper
Defeating Play Ransomware: A Comprehensive Rubrik Cyber Recovery Guide and learn how to detect, contain, and recover from Play ransomware—and future-proof your cyber resilience strategy.