Reading Time: 5 minutes Ransomware continues to be an escalating threat, with BlackFog reporting a record-breaking 278 publicly disclosed ransomware attacks in Q1 2025 alone – a 45% increase compared to Q1 2024. March 2025 saw the highest number of disclosed attacks since BlackFog began tracking in 2020, with 107 incidents.
These alarming statistics underscore the critical need for robust cyber defenses. The financial and operational fallout can be devastating, as evidenced by the mid-April 2025 cyberattack on UK retailer Marks & Spencer , which is estimated to cost the company around £300 million ($402 million) in lost profits. Worse, the company expects disruptions to last until July 2025, with sensitive customer data potentially compromised.
Traditional security measures and data backup strategies are increasingly insufficient against today's sophisticated ransomware infection. Data recovery is too slow and cumbersome to support the speed of business and organizations risk significant data loss and disruption.
Industry analysts increasingly recommend a cyberstorage approach, combining active and passive protection with complete visibility. This shifts the paradigm from reactive recovery to proactive resilience and better enables organizations to keep access to their data in the modern threat landscape.
Overcoming the Need for Backups: A Near-Zero RPO
Your Recovery Point Objective (RPO) dictates the maximum amount of data loss your organization can experience. With traditional backup approaches, achieving a tight RPO means frequent, costly, and cumbersome backup schedules. Worse, these backups are slow to restore as they involve moving large amounts of data, which can push your Recovery Time Objective (RTO) well beyond your stated Service Level Agreement (SLA) for downtime.
Panzura CloudFS, our powerful hybrid cloud file platform , takes a fundamentally different approach. CloudFS translates files to objects, splits data and metadata, and stores them as blocks, which are deduplicated inline; that is, compared to every other block within the file system. Metadata pointers record the blocks that comprise files at any given time. These blocks are then compressed, encrypted, and sent to your chosen secure cloud object store, where they become immutable. Critically, metadata is replicated across all network nodes, making them globally accessible.
This architecture enables continual snapshots – read-only 'pictures' of your data taken at prescribed intervals. Each snapshot captures the metadata pointers that reflect which immutable data blocks comprise a file at that precise moment. This ensures a complete and consistent state for rapid recovery. This continuous process delivers a near-zero global RPO, making traditional backup schedules entirely moot.
Early Detection, Granular Recovery, and Business Continuity
Ransomware attacks are a race against time. The speed of detection and recovery directly impacts business continuity. This is especially true given the alarming trend of data exfiltration, where attackers don't just encrypt your data but steal it for further extortion or sale on the dark web. BlackFog's Q1 2025 report reveals that a staggering 95% of all publicly disclosed ransomware attacks involved data exfiltration. This makes early detection not just about preventing data encryption, but crucially, about preventing the devastating consequences of sensitive data theft and potential compliance violations.
With CloudFS, if a bad actor unleashes a ransomware attack and encrypts your data, the data restoration process is guided by an immutable snapshot taken before the attack began. CloudFS's design ensures that every file version is stored as immutable blocks, and each snapshot captures the precise metadata pointers that map these blocks to their correct files at a given point in time. Instead of laboriously restoring massive duplicate files from backups, CloudFS enables granular recovery by simply selecting a clean snapshot, once you’ve brought the attack to a halt. The system uses the metadata pointers within that snapshot to instantly present the uncompromised data. Metadata is a fraction of the size of the data itself, so this method of rapidly restoring from an intact snapshot is dramatically faster than a full backup restore.
The Panzura CloudFS platform further elevates your defense with proactive detection capabilities. Panzura Data Services — the platform's insights and intelligence overlay — provides granular audit alerts, allowing you to set up policies that detect unusual file activity patterns, such as large volumes of data being copied or moved rapidly – tell-tale signs of potential data exfiltration attempts. These real-time alerts empower your security teams to investigate and respond to suspicious behavior before significant data is stolen and can assist to head off an encryption event by detecting compromised user accounts.
Adding another critical layer of defense is Panzura Detect and Rescue. This advanced solution leverages machine learning trained on your unique CloudFS environment to identify and alert on suspicious patterns that may indicate a ransomware attack in near real-time . Unlike other solutions, Detect and Rescue can identify both known ransomware families and new, previously unknown threats by spotting anomalies from expected user and file behaviors. If ransomware is confirmed, the system can automatically interdict the attack by shutting off write access for affected users, preventing further damage and containing the breach immediately.
This speed of detection can minimize the operational and financial impact of an attack by giving security and IT teams the chance to detect and stop an attack within the file system before it moves into other critical business systems.
Keys to Ransomware Mitigation
While no solution offers 100% immunity from attempted attacks and malicious activity, Panzura significantly shifts the balance of power in your favor, enhancing your ability to prevent, detect, and recover from ransomware incidents.
Continual Snapshots, Not Backups
Establish Robust Plans and Policies
Monitor File Activity With Alerts
Keep Systems Updated
Prioritize Security Awareness Training
Ransomware isn’t going anywhere — but with Panzura CloudFS, neither is your data.
To shift the balance of power in the fight against ransomware; explore a personalized demo and see how Panzura cyberstorage can secure your future.
Shift the balance of power in the fight against ransomware.
Ransomware Landscape in 2025 Highlights from BlackFog:
Attack Frequency: Q1 2025 saw a record 278 publicly disclosed ransomware attacks, a 45% increase from Q1 2024. March 2025 recorded the highest number of disclosed attacks since 2020 (107 attacks).
Data Exfiltration: A staggering 95% of all publicly disclosed attacks in Q1 2025 involved data exfiltration, highlighting the dual threat of encryption and data theft.
Cost of Recovery: While organizations recovered data in 97% of encrypted incidents, the recovery process can be lengthy and expensive. Many organizations still rely on backups (70% of incidents) or pay ransoms (46%). The mean cost to recover for organizations with revenues over $5 billion was nearly $5 million.
Recovery Time: For those using backups, 23% took over a month to recover. For those paying the ransom, 32% took over a month. In contrast, Panzura CloudFS aims for near-instant recovery.
