Biblio
Application whitelisting software allows only examined and trusted applications to run on user's machine. Since many malicious files don't require administrative privileges in order for them to be executed, whitelisting can be the only way to block the execution of unauthorized applications in enterprise environment and thus prevent infection or data breach. In order to assess the current state of such solutions, the access to three whitelisting solution licenses was obtained with the purpose to test their effectiveness against different modern types of ransomware found in the wild. To conduct this study a virtual environment was used with Windows Server and Enterprise editions installed. The objective of this paper is not to evaluate each vendor or make recommendations of purchasing specific software but rather to assess the ability of application control solutions to block execution of ransomware files, as well as assess the potential for future research. The results of the research show the promise and effectiveness of whitelisting solutions.
Most of the detection approaches like Signature based, Anomaly based and Specification based are not able to analyze and detect all types of malware. Signature-based approach for malware detection has one major drawback that it cannot detect zero-day attacks. The fundamental limitation of anomaly based approach is its high false alarm rate. And specification-based detection often has difficulty to specify completely and accurately the entire set of valid behaviors a malware should exhibit. Modern malware developers try to avoid detection by using several techniques such as polymorphic, metamorphic and also some of the hiding techniques. In order to overcome these issues, we propose a new approach for malware analysis and detection that consist of the following twelve stages Inbound Scan, Inbound Attack, Spontaneous Attack, Client-Side Exploit, Egg Download, Device Infection, Local Reconnaissance, Network Surveillance, & Communications, Peer Coordination, Attack Preparation, and Malicious Outbound Propagation. These all stages will integrate together as interrelated process in our proposed approach. This approach had solved the limitations of all the three approaches by monitoring the behavioral activity of malware at each any every stage of life cycle and then finally it will give a report of the maliciousness of the files or software's.