Toward an early assessment for Ransomware attack vulnerabilities
Rabia Malkawe, Malik Qasaimeh, Firas Ghanim, Mohammad Ababneh · 2019
In 1989 the first extortion for currency using a Trojan called AIDS was logged in history, revealing a new threat to data and resources of individuals and organizations, globally known as ransomware. Ransomware is a type of malicious software that has the ability to duplicate itself on a network, affecting devices by locking access to these devices or encrypting data where only the attacker has the decryption key to restore this affected data. This gives the attacker the privilege to demand an amount of money, or a ransom, in order to send the decryption key to the victim, or unlock their device. This paper aims to propose a matrix of measures used to assess the vulnerability of IoT devices or systems to the threat of ransomware, which allows different entities to be prepared for this kind of attack, through shedding the light on ransomware as a major issue threatening today's modern life, from smart cars, smart homes, electronic health records, to planted heart pacemakers; by presenting some previous ransomware attack cases, presenting and discussing some of the current ransomware detection or prevention techniques.