Among many prevailing malware, crypto-ransomware poses a significant threat as it financially extorts affected users by creating denial of access via unauthorized encryption of their documents as well as holding their documents hostage and financially extorting them. This results in millions of dollars of annual losses worldwide. Multiple variants of ransomware are growing in number with capabilities of evasion from many anti-viruses and software-only malware detection schemes that rely on static execution signatures. In this paper, we propose a hardware-assisted scheme, called RanStop, for early detection of crypto-ransomware infection in commodity processors. RanStop leverages the information of hardware performance counters embedded in the performance monitoring unit in modern processors to observe micro-architectural event sets and detects known and unknown crypto-ransomware variants. In this paper, we train a recurrent neural network-based machine learning architecture using long short-term memory (LSTM) model for analyzing micro-architectural events in the hardware domain when executing multiple variants of ransomware as well as benign programs. We create timeseries to develop intrinsic statistical features using the information of related HPCs and improve the detection accuracy of RanStop and reduce noise by via LSTM and global average pooling. As an early detection scheme, RanStop can accurately and quickly identify ransomware within 2ms from the start of the program execution by analyzing HPC information collected for 20 timestamps each 100us apart. This detection time is too early for a ransomware to make any significant damage, if none. Moreover, validation against benign programs with behavioral (sub-routine-centric) similarity with that of a crypto-ransomware shows that RanStop can detect ransomware with an average of 97% accuracy for fifty random trials.
This research seeks to expose a major weakness in Crypto-ransomware by modeling it as four integral sub-systems consisting of: An Agent, a Command and Control Service (CNC), an anonymous payment channel (APC) and an obfuscated command channel (OCC). We will show that most modern counter-measures focus on either the Agent or the CNC subsystems and usually in a reactive way exposing the target to undue risk. However, by disrupting this fourth component - the Obfuscated Command Channel - we can proactively and safely defeat a wide variety of crypto-ransomware.
Ransomware is currently the key threat for individual as well as corporate Internet users. Especially dangerous is crypto ransomware that encrypts important user data and it is only possible to recover it once a ransom has been paid. Therefore devising efficient and effective countermeasures is a rising necessity. In this paper we present a novel Software-Defined Networking (SDN) based detection approach that utilizes characteristics of ransomware communication. Based on the observation of network communication of two crypto ransomware families, namely CryptoWall and Locky we conclude that ana…
Ransomware is a significant global threat, with easy deployment due to the prevalent ransomware-as-a-service model. Machine learning algorithms incorporating the use of opcode characteristics and Support Vector Machine have been demonstrated to be a successful method for general malware detection. This research focuses on crypto-ransomware and uses static analysis of malicious and benign Portable Executable files to extract 443 opcodes across all samples, representing them as density histograms within the dataset. Using the SMO classifier and PUK kernel in the WEKA machine learning toolset it …
Emergence of crypto-ransomware has significantly changed the cyber threat landscape. A crypto ransomware removes data custodian access by encrypting valuable data on victims' computers and requests a ransom payment to reinstantiate custodian access by decrypting data. Timely detection of ransomware very much depends on how quickly and accurately system logs can be mined to hunt abnormalities and stop the evil. In this paper we first setup an environment to collect activity logs of 517 Locky ransomware samples, 535 Cerber ransomware samples and 572 samples of TeslaCrypt ransomware. We utilize S…
Ransomware can produce direct and controllable economic loss, which makes it one of the most prominent threats in cyber security. As per the latest statistics, more than half of malwares reported in Q1 of 2017 are ransomware and there is a potent threat of a novice cybercriminals accessing rasomware-as-a-service. The concept of public-key based data kidnapping and subsequent extortion was introduced in 1996. Since then, variants of ransomware emerged with different cryptosystems and larger key sizes though, the underlying techniques remained same. Though there are works in literature which pro…
Ransomware is considered as a significant threat for most enterprises since the past few years. In scenarios wherein users can access all files on a shared server, one infected host can lock the access to all shared files. We propose a tool to detect ransomware infection based on file-sharing traffic analysis. The tool monitors the traffic exchanged between the clients and the file servers and using machine learning techniques it searches for patterns in the traffic that betray ransomware actions while reading and overwriting files. The proposal is designed to work for clear text and for encry…
Ransomware is a malicious class of software that utilises encryption to implement an attack on system availability. The target's data remains encrypted and is held captive by the attacker until a ransom demand is met. A common approach used by many crypto-ransomware detection techniques is to monitor file system activity and attempt to identify encrypted files being written to disk, often using a file's entropy as an indicator of encryption. However, often in the description of these techniques, little or no discussion is made as to why a particular entropy calculation technique is selected or…
Ransomware is a kind of malware using cryptographic mechanisms to prevent victims from normal use of their computers. As a result, victims lose the access to their files and desktops unless they pay the ransom to the attackers. By the end of 2019, ransomware attack had caused more than 10 billion dollars of financial loss to enterprises and individuals. In this work, we propose Network-Assisted Approach (NAA), which contains effective local detection and network-level detection mechanisms, to help users determine whether a machine has been infected by ransomware. To evaluate its performance, w…
The damage caused by crypto-ransomware, due to encryption, is difficult to revert and cause data losses. In this paper, a machine learning (ML) classifier was built to early detect ransomware (called crypto-ransomware) that uses cryptography by program behavior. If a signature-based detection was missed, a behavior-based detector can be the last line of defense to detect and contain the damages. We find that input/output activities of ransomware and the file-content entropy are unique traits to detect crypto-ransomware. A deep-learning (DL) classifier can detect ransomware with a high accuracy…
Ransomware can produce direct and controllable economic loss, which makes it one of the most prominent threats in cyber security. As per the latest statistics, more than half of malwares reported in Q1 of 2017 are ransomwares and there is a potent threat of a novice cybercriminals accessing ransomware-as-a-service. The concept of public-key based data kidnapping and subsequent extortion was introduced in 1996. Since then, variants of ransomware emerged with different cryptosystems and larger key sizes, the underlying techniques remained same. Though there are works in literature which proposes…
Faculty of Computing, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia（马来西亚理工大学计算机学院）
Crypto-ransomware is characterized by its irreversible effect even after the detection and removal. As such, the early detection is crucial to protect user data and files of being held to ransom. Several solutions have proposed utilizing the data extracted during the initial phases of the attacks before the encryption takes place. However, the lack of enough data at the early phases of the attack along with high dimensional features space renders the model prone to overfitting which decreases its detection accuracy. To this end, this paper proposed a novel redundancy coefficient gradual up-wei…
Detection and analysis of a potential malware specifically, used for ransom is a challenging task. Recently, intruders are utilizing advanced cryptographic techniques to get hold of digital assets and then demand a ransom. It is believed that generally, the files comprise of some attributes, states, and patterns that can be recognized by a machine learning technique. This work thus focuses on the detection of Ransomware by performing feature engineering, which helps in analyzing vital attributes and behaviors of the malware. The main contribution of this work is the identification of important…
Proliferation of cryptocurrencies (e.g., Bitcoin) that allow pseudo-anonymous transactions, has made it easier for ransomware developers to demand ransom by encrypting sensitive user data. The recently revealed strikes of ransomware attacks have already resulted in significant economic losses and societal harm across different sectors, ranging from local governments to health care. Most modern ransomware use Bitcoin for payments. However, although Bitcoin transactions are permanently recorded and publicly available, current approaches for detecting ransomware depend only on a couple of heurist…
The threat from ransomware continues to grow both in the number of affected victims as well as the cost incurred by the people and organisations impacted in a successful attack. In the majority of cases, once a victim has been attacked there remain only two courses of action open to them; either pay the ransom or lose their data. One common behaviour shared between all crypto ransomware strains is that at some point during their execution they will attempt to encrypt the users' files. Previous research Penrose et al. (2013); Zhao et al. (2011) has highlighted the difficulty in differentiating …
Ransomware is an emerging threat which imposed a \$ 5 billion loss in 2017 and is predicted to hit \$ 11.5 billion in 2019. While initially targeting PC (client) platforms, ransomware recently made the leap to server-side databases - starting in January 2017 with the MongoDB Apocalypse attack, followed by other attack waves targeting a wide range of DB types such as MongoDB, MySQL, ElasticSearch, Cassandra, Hadoop, and CouchDB. While previous research has developed countermeasures against client-side ransomware (e.g., CryptoDrop and ShieldFS), the problem of server-side ransomware has received…
Traditional techniques to prevent damage from ransomware attacks are to detect and block attacks by monitoring the known behaviors such as frequent name changes, recurring access to cryptographic libraries and exchange keys with remote servers. Unfortunately, intelligent ransomware can easily bypass these techniques. Another prevention technique is to recover from the backup copy when a file is infected with ransomware. However, the data backup technique requires extra storage space and can be removed with ransomware. In this paper, we propose to implement an access control mechanism on a disk…
MLRan: A Behavioural Dataset for Ransomware Analysis and Detection
School of Computer Science, University College Dublin（都柏林大学计算机科学学院）；SFI Center for Research Training in Machine Learning（SFI机器学习研究培训中心）；Lero, Research Ireland Centre for Software（爱尔兰软件研究中心）；University of Ibadan（伊巴丹大学）
Over the last decade botnets survived by adopting a sequence of increasingly sophisticated strategies to evade detection and take overs, and to monetize their infrastructure. At the same time, the success of privacy infrastructures such as Tor opened the door to illegal activities, including botnets, ransomware, and a marketplace for drugs and contraband. We contend that the next waves of botnets will extensively subvert privacy infrastructure and cryptographic mechanisms. In this work we propose to preemptively investigate the design and mitigation of such botnets. We first, introduce OnionBo…
