Variants of Ransomware Assaults and Prevention Strategies

Abstract

Cybercrime is randomly increasing as we are moving towards a data-centric environment and more importance should be given in securing user data from rigorous attack done by Ransomware, which is a type of malware. Ransomware enters into a victim’s machine via a malicious phishing mail, link or executable program. In current days various types of Ransomware categorized as
crypto ransomware and locker ransomware which prevents user from accessing their system, either by locking the system's screen or block access to the files by encrypting user’s files in the system until a ransom is paid via crypto currency i.e. bit coin which is very hard to trace and victims won’t be
able to get the decrypt key and gain access to their encrypted files. Ransomware has turn into one of the most popular means of earning money for cyber criminals. Targets of ransomware are hospitals, police department, public schools, home computers, banking sector etc. Adversaries will use
algorithms to find flaws and to target for those who invest on non-security personnel and ignore security technologies. Furthermore, the technology of delivering the ransomware is continuously growing, accordingly it has turn out to be increasingly hard to protect. Attacks can be prevented by security awareness training, updates, patches, continuous vulnerability assessment, intrusion detection, file integrity checking etc. Here in this paper we focus on types of ransomware its detection and prevention of different types of ransomware attacks.