Understanding the impact of Ransomware: A Survey on its Evolution, Mitigation and Prevention 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 detection 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. It is expected that in near future with the increasing number of devices connected to the network, ransomware will soon spread to new categories of devices. 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.