Biblio

This article is about the current situation of cybercrime activity in the world. Research was planned to seek the possible protection measures taking into account the last events which might create an appropriate background for increasing of ransomware damages and cybercrime attacks. Nowadays, the most spread types of cybercrimes are fishing, theft of personal or payment data, cryptojacking, cyberespionage and ransomware. The last one is the most dangerous. It has ability to spread quickly and causes damages and sufficient financial loses. The major problem of this ransomware type is unpredictability of its behavior. It could be overcome only after the defined ransom was paid. This conditions created an appropriate background for the activation of cyber criminals’ activity even the organization of cyber gangs – professional, well-organized and well-prepared (tactical) group. So, researches conducted in this field have theoretical and practical value in the scientific sphere of research.

Phishing, ransomware and cryptojacking are the main threats to cyber security in recent years. We consider the stages of phishing attacks, examples of such attacks, specifically, attacks using ransomware, malicious PDF files, and banking trojans. The article describes the specifics of phishing emails. Advices on phishing protection are given.

Ransomware is one of the most serious threats which constitute a significant challenge in the cybersecurity field. The cybercriminals use this attack to encrypts the victim's files or infect the victim's devices to demand ransom in exchange to restore access to these files and devices. The escalating threat of Ransomware to thousands of individuals and companies requires an urgent need for creating a system capable of proactively detecting and preventing ransomware. In this research, a new approach is proposed to detect and classify ransomware based on three machine learning algorithms (Random Forest, Support Vector Machines , and Näive Bayes). The features set was extracted directly from raw byte using static analysis technique of samples to improve the detection speed. To offer the best detection accuracy, CF-NCF (Class Frequency - Non-Class Frequency) has been utilized for generate features vectors. The proposed approach can differentiate between ransomware and goodware files with a detection accuracy of up to 98.33 percent.

In recent years we have observed an escalation of cybersecurity attacks, which are becoming more sophisticated and harder to detect as they use more advanced evasion techniques and encrypted communications. The research community has often proposed the use of machine learning techniques to overcome the limitations of traditional cybersecurity approaches based on rules and signatures, which are hard to maintain, require constant updates, and do not solve the problems of zero-day attacks. Unfortunately, machine learning is not the holy grail of cybersecurity: machine learning-based techniques are hard to develop due to the lack of annotated data, are often computationally intensive, they can be target of hard to detect adversarial attacks, and more importantly are often not able to provide explanations for the predicted outcomes. In this paper, we describe a novel approach to cybersecurity detection leveraging on the concept of security score. Our approach demonstrates that extracting signals via deep packet inspections paves the way for efficient detection using traffic analysis. This work has been validated against various traffic datasets containing network attacks, showing that it can effectively detect network threats without the complexity of machine learning-based solutions.

Technological progress has changed our world beyond recognition. However, along with the incredible benefits and conveniences we have received new dangers and risks. Mankind is increasingly becoming hostage to information technology and cyber world. Recently, cybercrime is one of the top 10 risks to sustainable development in the world. It poses serious new challenges to global security and economy. The aim of the article is to obtain an assessment of some of the financial effects of modern IT crimes based on an analysis of the main aspects of monetary costs and the hidden economic impact of cybercrime. A multifactor regression model has been proposed to determine the contribution of the cost of the main consequences of IT incidents: business disruption, information loss, revenue loss and equipment damage caused by different types of cyberattacks worldwide in 2019 to total cost of cyberattacks. Information loss has been found to have a major impact on the total cost of cyberattacks, reducing profits and incurring additional costs for businesses. It was built a canonical model for identifying the dependence of total submission to ID ransomware, total cost of cybercrime and the main indicators of economic development for the TOP-10 countries. There is a significant correlation between two sets of indicators, in particular, it is confirmed that most cyberattacks target countries - countries with a high level of development, and the consequences of IT crimes are more significant for low-income countries.

The Supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems have been continuously leveraging the evolution of network architecture, communication protocols, next-generation communication techniques (5G, 6G, Wi-Fi 6), and the internet of things (IoT). However, SCADA system has become the most profitable and alluring target for ransomware attackers. This paper proposes the deep learning-based novel ransomware detection framework in the SCADA controlled electric vehicle charging station (EVCS) with the performance analysis of three deep learning algorithms, namely deep neural network (DNN), 1D convolution neural network (CNN), and long short-term memory (LSTM) recurrent neural network. All three-deep learning-based simulated frameworks achieve around 97% average accuracy (ACC), more than 98% of the average area under the curve (AUC) and an average F1-score under 10-fold stratified cross-validation with an average false alarm rate (FAR) less than 1.88%. Ransomware driven distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack tends to shift the state of charge (SOC) profile by exceeding the SOC control thresholds. Also, ransomware driven false data injection (FDI) attack has the potential to damage the entire BES or physical system by manipulating the SOC control thresholds. It's a design choice and optimization issue that a deep learning algorithm can deploy based on the tradeoffs between performance metrics.

At present, the detection of encrypted ransomware under the Android platform mainly relies on analyzing the API call of the encryption function. But for ransomware that uses a custom encryption algorithm, the method will be invalid. This article analyzed the files before and after encryption by the ransomware, and found that there were obvious changes in the information entropy and file name of the files. Based on this, this article proposed a detection method for encrypted ransomware under the Android platform. Through pre-setting decoy files and the characteristic judgment before and after the execution of the sample to be tested, completed the detection and judgment of the ransomware. Having tested 214 samples, this method can be porved to detect encrypted ransomware accurately under the Android platform, with an accuracy rate of 98.24%.

This paper uses Endsley's situational awareness model as a starting point for creating a new cyber-security awareness model for risk maturity. This is used to model the relationship between risk management-based situational awareness and levels of maturity in making decisions to deal with potential cyber-attacks. The risk maturity related to cyber situational awareness using the fuzzy failure mode effect analysis (FMEA) method is needed as a basis for effective risk-based decision making and to measure the level of maturity in decision making using the Software Engineering Institute Capability Maturity Model Integration (SEI CMMI) approach. The novelty of this research is that it builds a model of the relationship between the level of maturity and the level of risk in cyber-situational awareness. Based on the data during the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a decrease in the number of incidents, including the following decreases: from 15-29 cases of malware attacks to 8-12 incidents, from 20-35 phishing cases to 12-15 cases and from 5-10 ransomware cases to 5-6 cases.

Ransomware attack is posting a serious threat against Android devices and stored data that could be locked or/and encrypted by such attack. Existing solutions attempt to detect and prevent such attack by studying different features and applying various analysis mechanisms including static, dynamic or both. In this paper, recent ransomware detection solutions were investigated and compared. Moreover, a deep analysis of android permissions was conducted to identify significant android permissions that can discriminate ransomware with high accuracy before harming users' devices. Consequently, based on the outcome of this analysis, a permissions-based ransomware detection system is proposed. Different classifiers were tested to build the prediction model of this detection system. After the evaluation of the ransomware detection service, the results revealed high detection rate that reached 96.9%. Additionally, the newly permission-based android dataset constructed in this research will be made available to researchers and developers for future work.

Modern cryptographic ransomware pose a severe threat to the security of individuals and organizations. Targeted ransomware attacks exhibit refinement in attack vectors owing to the manual reconnaissance performed by the perpetrators for infiltration. The result is an impenetrable lock on multiple hosts within the organization which allows the cybercriminals to demand hefty ransoms. Reliance on prevention strategies is not sufficient and a firm comprehension of implementation details is necessary to develop effective solutions that can thwart ransomware after preventative strategies have failed. Ransomware depend heavily on the abstraction offered by Windows APIs. This paper provides a detailed review of the common API calls in ransomware. We propose four classes of API calls that can be used for profiling and generating effective API call relationships useful in automated detection. Finally, we present counts and visualizations pertaining to API call extraction from real-world ransomware that demonstrate that even advanced variants from different families carry similarities in implementation.

Ransomware acquire the leverage necessary for ransom extraction via encryption of irreplaceable data. Successful encryption requires secure key generation and therefore comprehension of key generation strategies deployed in ransomware is critical for developing effective response and recovery solutions. This paper presents a systematic study of key generation strategies observed in modern ransomware with the goal of facilitating swift identification of cryptographically insecure and operationally nonviable key routines in novel threats. Empirical evidence of the identified strategies is provided in the form of code snippets and disassembly of real-world ransomware. Additionally, the identified strategies are mapped to a timeline based on the actual ransomware samples where these strategies were observed. Finally, a list of 10 questions provides guidance in recognizing the critical intricacies of key generation and deployment in novel ransomware.

This paper investigates the use of Software-Defined Networking (SDN) in the detection and mitigation of malware threat, focusing on the example of ExPetr ransomware. Extensive static and dynamic analysis of ExPetr is performed in a purpose-built SDN testbed. The results acquired from this analysis are then used to design and implement an SDN-based solution to detect the malware and prevent it from spreading to other machines inside a local network. Our solution consists of three security mechanisms that have been implemented as components/modules of the Python-based POX controller. These mechanisms include: port blocking, SMB payload inspection, and HTTP payload inspection. When malicious activity is detected, the controller communicates with the SDN switches via the OpenFlow protocol and installs appropriate entries in their flow tables. In particular, the controller blocks machines which are considered infected, by monitoring and reacting in real time to the network traffic they produce. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed designs are effective against self-propagating malware in local networks. The implemented system can respond to malicious activities quickly and in real time. Furthermore, by tuning certain thresholds of the detection mechanisms it is possible to trade-off the detection time with the false positive rate.

Currently as the widespread use of virtual monetary units (like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple, Litecoin) has begun, people with bad intentions have been attracted to this area and have produced and marketed ransomware in order to obtain virtual currency easily. This ransomware infiltrates the victim's system with smartly-designed methods and encrypts the files found in the system. After the encryption process, the attacker leaves a message demanding a ransom in virtual currency to open access to the encrypted files and warns that otherwise the files will not be accessible. This type of ransomware is becoming more popular over time, so currently it is the largest information technology security threat. In the literature, there are many studies about detection and analysis of this cyber-bullying. In this study, we focused on crypto-ransomware and investigated a forensic analysis of a current attack example in detail. In this example, the attack method and behavior of the crypto-ransomware were analyzed and it was identified that information belonging to the attacker was accessible. With this dimension, we think our study will significantly contribute to the struggle against this threat.

With the spread of information technology in human life, data protection is a critical task. On the other hand, malicious programs are developed, which can manipulate sensitive and critical data and restrict access to this data. Ransomware is an example of such a malicious program that encrypts data, restricts users' access to the system or their data, and then request a ransom payment. Many types of research have been proposed for ransomware detection. Most of these methods attempt to identify ransomware by relying on program behavior during execution. The main weakness of these methods is that it is not clear how long the program should be monitored to show its real behavior. Therefore, sometimes, these researches cannot early detect ransomware. In this paper, a new method for ransomware detection is proposed that does not require running the program and uses the PE header of the executable files. To extract effective features from the PE header files, an image based on PE header is constructed. Then, according to the advantages of Convolutional Neural Networks in extracting features from images and classifying them, CNN is used. The proposed method achieves 93.33% accuracy. Our results indicate the usefulness and practicality method for ransomware detection.

Ransomware attacks cost businesses more than \$75 billion/year, and it is predicted to cost \$6 trillion/year by 2021. These numbers demonstrate the havoc produced by ransomware on a large number of sectors and urge security researches to tackle it. Several ransomware detection approaches have been proposed in the literature that interchange between static and dynamic analysis. Recently, ransomware attacks were shown to fingerprint the execution environment before they attack the system to counter dynamic analysis. In this paper, we exploit the behavior of contemporary ransomware to prevent its attack on real systems and thus avoid the loss of any data. We explore a set of ransomware-generated artifacts that are launched to sniff the surrounding. Furthermore, we design, develop, and evaluate an approach that monitors the behavior of a program by intercepting the called Windows APIs. Consequently, we determine in real-time if the program is trying to inspect its surrounding before the attack, and abort it immediately prior to the initiation of any malicious encryption or locking. Through empirical evaluations using real and recent ransomware samples, we study how ransomware and benign programs inspect the environment. Additionally, we demonstrate how to prevent ransomware with a low false positive rate. We make the developed approach available to the research community at large through GitHub to strongly promote cyber security defense operations and for wide-scale evaluations and enhancements.

In this paper, we are going to verify the possibility to create a ransomware simulation that will use an arbitrary combination of known tactics and techniques to bypass an anti-malware defense. To verify this hypothesis, we conducted an experiment in which an agent was trained with the help of reinforcement learning to run the ransomware simulator in a way that can bypass anti-ransomware solution and encrypt the target files. The novelty of the proposed method lies in applying reinforcement learning to anti-ransomware testing that may help to identify weaknesses in the anti-ransomware defense and fix them before a real attack happens.

Cloud computing has become the main backend of the IT infrastructure as it provides ubiquitous and on-demand computing to serve to a wide range of users including end-users and high-performance demanding agencies. The users can allocate and free resources allocated for their Virtual Machines (VMs) as needed. However, with the rapid growth of interest in cloud computing systems, several issues have arisen especially in the domain of cybersecurity. It is a known fact that not only the malicious users can freely allocate VMs, but also they can infect victims' VMs to run their own tools that include cryptocurrency mining, ransomware, or cyberattacks against others. Even though there exist intrusion detection systems (IDS), running an IDS on every VM can be a costly process and it would require fine configuration that only a small subset of the cloud users are knowledgeable about. Therefore, to overcome this challenge, in this paper we present a VM introspection based allowlisting method to be deployed and managed directly by the cloud providers to check if there are any malicious software running on the VMs with minimum user intervention. Our middleware monitors the processes and if it detects unknown events, it will notify the users and/or can take action as needed.

Ransomware attacks are taking advantage of the ongoing pandemics and attacking the vulnerable systems in business, health sector, education, insurance, bank, and government sectors. Various approaches have been proposed to combat ransomware, but the dynamic nature of malware writers often bypasses the security checkpoints. There are commercial tools available in the market for ransomware analysis and detection, but their performance is questionable. This paper aims at proposing an AI-based ransomware detection framework and designing a detection tool (AIRaD) using a combination of both static and dynamic malware analysis techniques. Dynamic binary instrumentation is done using PIN tool, function call trace is analyzed leveraging Cuckoo sandbox and Ghidra. Features extracted at DLL, function call, and assembly level are processed with NLP, association rule mining techniques and fed to different machine learning classifiers. Support vector machine and Adaboost with J48 algorithms achieved the highest accuracy of 99.54% with 0.005 false-positive rates for a multi-level combined term frequency approach.

In recent times, there has been a global surge of ransomware attacks targeted at industries of various types and sizes from retail to critical infrastructure. Ransomware researchers are constantly coming across new kinds of ransomware samples every day and discovering novel ransomware families out in the wild. To mitigate this ever-growing menace, academia and industry-based security researchers have been utilizing unique ways to defend against this type of cyber-attacks. I/O Request Packet (IRP), a low-level file system I/O log, is a newly found research paradigm for defense against ransomware that is being explored frequently. As such in this study, to learn granular level, actionable insights of ransomware behavior, we analyze the IRP logs of 272 ransomware samples belonging to 18 different ransomware families captured during individual execution. We further our analysis by building an effective Artificial Neural Network (ANN) structure for successful ransomware detection by learning the underlying patterns of the IRP logs. We evaluate the ANN model with three different experimental settings to prove the effectiveness of our approach. The model demonstrates outstanding performance in terms of accuracy, precision score, recall score, and F1 score, i.e., in the range of 99.7%±0.2%.

In the last couple of years, the move to cyberspace provides a fertile environment for ransomware criminals like ever before. Notably, since the introduction of WannaCry, numerous ransomware detection solution has been proposed. However, the ransomware incidence report shows that most organizations impacted by ransomware are running state of the art ransomware detection tools. Hence, an alternative solution is an urgent requirement as the existing detection models are not sufficient to spot emerging ransomware treat. With this motivation, our work proposes "DeepGuard," a novel concept of modeling user behavior for ransomware detection. The main idea is to log the file-interaction pattern of typical user activity and pass it through deep generative autoencoder architecture to recreate the input. With sufficient training data, the model can learn how to reconstruct typical user activity (or input) with minimal reconstruction error. Hence, by applying the three-sigma limit rule on the model's output, DeepGuard can distinguish the ransomware activity from the user activity. The experiment result shows that DeepGuard effectively detects a variant class of ransomware with minimal false-positive rates. Overall, modeling the attack detection with user-behavior permits the proposed strategy to have deep visibility of various ransomware families.

Ransomware have observed a steady growth over the years with several concerning trends that indicate efficient, targeted attacks against organizations and individuals alike. These opportunistic attackers indiscriminately target both public and private sector entities to maximize gain. In this article, we highlight the criticality of key management in ransomware's cryptosystem in order to facilitate building effective solutions against this threat. We introduce the ransomware kill chain to elucidate the path our adversaries must take to attain their malicious objective. We examine current solutions presented against ransomware in light of this kill chain and specify which constraints on ransomware are being violated by the existing solutions. Finally, we present the notion of memory attacks against ransomware's key management and present our initial experiments with dynamically extracting decryption keys from real-world ransomware. Results of our preliminary research are promising and the extracted keys were successfully deployed in subsequent data decryption.

Emerging trends that are shaping the future of the automotive industry include electrification, autonomous driving, sharing, and connectivity, and these trends keep changing annually. Thus, the automotive industry is shifting from mechanical devices to electronic control devices, and is not moving to Internet of Things devices connected to 5G networks. Owing to the convergence of automobile-information and communication technology (ICT), the safety and convenience features of automobiles have improved significantly. However, cyberattacks that occur in the existing ICT environment and can occur in the upcoming 5G network are being replicated in the automobile environment. In a hyper-connected society where 5G networks are commercially available, automotive security is extremely important, as vehicles become the center of vehicle to everything (V2X) communication connected to everything around them. Designing, developing, and deploying information security techniques for vehicles require a systematic security-risk-assessment and management process throughout the vehicle's lifecycle. To do this, a security risk analysis (SRA) must be performed, which requires an analysis of cyber threats on automotive vehicles. In this study, we introduce a cyber kill chain-based cyberattack analysis method to create a formal vulnerability-analysis system. We can also analyze car-hacking studies that were conducted on real cars to identify the characteristics of the attack stages of existing car-hacking techniques and propose the minimum but essential measures for defense. Finally, we propose an automotive common-vulnerabilities-and-exposure system to manage and share evolving vehicle-related cyberattacks, threats, and vulnerabilities.

With rising value and popularity of cryptocurrencies, they inevitably attract cybercriminals seeking illicit profits within blockchain ecosystem. Two of the most popular methods are ransomware and cryptojacking. Ransomware, being the first and more obvious threat has been extensively studied in the past. Unlike that, scientists have often neglected cryptojacking, because it’s less obvious and less harmful than ransomware. In this paper, we’d like to propose enhanced detection program to combat cryptojacking, additionally briefly touching history of cryptojacking, also known as malicious mining and reviewing most notable previous attempts to detect and combat cryptojacking. The review would include out previous work on malicious mining detection and our current detection program is based on its previous iteration, which mostly used CPU usage heuristics to detect cryptojacking. However, we will include additional metrics for malicious mining detection, such as network usage and calls to cryptographic libraries, which result in a 93% detection rate against the selected number of cryptojacking samples, compared to 81% rate achieved in previous work. Finally, we’ll discuss generalization of proposed detection technique to include GPU cryptojackers.

With rise of cryptocurrency popularity and value, more and more cybercriminals seek to profit using that new technology. Most common ways to obtain illegitimate profit using cryptocurrencies are ransomware and cryptojacking also known as malicious mining. And while ransomware is well-known and well-studied threat which is obvious by design, cryptojacking is often neglected because it's less harmful and much harder to detect. This article considers question of cryptojacking detection. Brief history and definition of cryptojacking are described as well as reasons for designing custom detection technique. We also propose complex detection technique based on CPU load by an application, which can be applied to both browser-based and executable-type cryptojacking samples. Prototype detection program based on our technique was designed using decision tree algorithm. The program was tested in a controlled virtual machine environment and achieved 82% success rate against selected number of cryptojacking samples. Finally, we'll discuss generalization of proposed technique for future work.

Autonomy in cybersystems depends on their ability to be self-aware by understanding the intent of services and applications that are running on those systems. In case of mission-critical cybersystems that are deployed in dynamic and unpredictable environments, the newly integrated unknown applications or services can either be benign and essential for the mission or they can be cyberattacks. In some cases, these cyberattacks are evasive Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) where the attackers remain undetected for reconnaissance in order to ascertain system features for an attack e.g. Trojan Laziok. In other cases, the attackers can use the system only for computing e.g. cryptomining malware. APTs such as cryptomining malware neither disrupt normal system functionalities nor trigger any warning signs because they simply perform bitwise and cryptographic operations as any other benign compression or encoding application. Thus, it is difficult for defense mechanisms such as antivirus applications to detect these attacks. In this paper, we propose an Operating Context profiling system based on deep neural networks-Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks-using Windows Performance Counters data for detecting these evasive cryptomining applications. In addition, we propose Deep Cryptomining Profiler (DeCrypto Pro), a detection system with a novel model selection framework containing a utility function that can select a classification model for behavior profiling from both the light-weight machine learning models (Random Forest and k-Nearest Neighbors) and a deep learning model (LSTM), depending on available computing resources. Given data from performance counters, we show that individual models perform with high accuracy and can be trained with limited training data. We also show that the DeCrypto Profiler framework reduces the use of computational resources and accurately detects cryptomining applications by selecting an appropriate model, given the constraints such as data sample size and system configuration.