16 Jun Ransomware: File Data Is Harder to Manage and Defend
This week in cybersecurity from the editors at Cybercrime Magazine
Sausalito, Calif. – Jun. 16, 2025
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Ransomware is predicted to cost victims around $275 billion annually by 2031, according to Cybersecurity Ventures. Yet, despite this growing threat, most organizations’ data protection strategies remain narrowly focused on mission-critical systems — typically stored as block data — while neglecting one of the most vulnerable and expansive targets: unstructured file data. This is because it is way too expensive to protect the vast amount of unstructured file data organizations have and are continuing to amass.
While IT teams invest heavily in protecting databases and applications, file data often lives outside the spotlight of cybersecurity investments. Yet it’s exactly this data — PDFs, presentations, media files, logs, research data and more — that represents the most complex and risky data footprint.
File data may not always be considered “critical,” but it is an ideal attack surface for ransomware. Created and shared across departments, accessed by multiple users and systems, file data presents a sprawling and dynamic attack surface.
It only takes one infected file to compromise an entire enterprise network.
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