Mitigating Ransomware Attacks at the Block Level with OpenZFS

Ransomware attacks that hold your data hostage using unauthorized data encryption are spreading rapidly and are particularly nefarious because they do not require any special access privileges to your data. The result of a ransomware attack thus can be indistinguishable from a user simply deleting his or her own data with their standard permissions. While ransomware attacks cannot be institutionally prevented, they can be institutionally mitigated using OpenZFS' snapshot, clone and rollback facilities. From DAS to NAS/SAN and virtual machine storage, OpenZFS and OpenZFS-based storage appliances can provide organization-wide infrastructure that can efficiently recover from ransomware attacks.