Ransomware Threat, Attack, Prevention and Cure on Window Platform

Abstract

With the advancement of digitization in every domain, the dependency of individuals on these digitized softwares has also increased. Although these softwares can perform storage, transfer, and security of digital media easily, the threat of hardware/software failure, data tapping and breaching data has always been there. Most of these threats have been introduced by the development of malicious softwares that can provide unauthorized access of machine’s data. This malicious software was termed as malware. The development of any antimalware software to prevent the machine from malware triggers the attacker to generate new malicious operations to infect the machine. Ransomware is, however, a novel and one of the dangerous malware invented recently that restricts the user from accessing their system by locking the operating system files using strong encryption algorithms in the system unless and until a ransom is paid. Seeing the emergence of this ransomware threat and also the increasing usage of digital media, many techniques have been developed to detect the presence of different types of ransomware in different environments. Since the importance of developing techniques to prevent our machines from such attacks is increasing substantially, further research in the respective domain require thorough analysis of all the techniques that have been developed in this regard. This paper introduces the concept of ransomware and how it has been evolved. Along with various methods of handling the ransomware, thorough analysis of techniques that have been developed until now for the prevention and detection of different ransomwares is also performed. The analysis shows that there has been a big improvement in coding techniques utilized by ransomware which will eventually turn out a good detection system that considerably reduces the quantity of victim information loss.