Understanding the Influence of Ransomware: An Investigation on its Development, Mitigation and Avoidance Techniques

Ransomware is a way of money extortion by cyber-attackers in which user’s files are encrypted and the decryption key is held by the attackers until a ransom amount is received from the victim. It is a highly advanced malware in which developing new variants is trivial thereby facilitating the evasion of many antivirus and intrusion mitigation systems. The cyber-attackers behind the development of ransomware are constantly improving their attacking strategy by improving the malwares constantly. This is making it harder to develop effective long-lasting countermeasures to prevent such attacks. With the increase in usage of smartphones, even they are being targeted besides desktops and servers. In this paper, we present a brief history of ransomware, best safety mechanisms to prevent such attacks. Recent attacks on famous organizations are discussed with respect to monetary loss involved in those attacks. We propose a model to prevent and detect any cryptographic operations in business organization.