Biblio

Modern cybercrimes have exponentially grown over the last one decade. Ransomware is one of the types of malware which is the result of sophisticated attempt to compromise the modern computer systems. The governments and large corporations are investing heavily to combat this cyber threat against their critical infrastructure. It has been observed that over the last few years that Industrial Control Systems (ICS) have become the main target of Ransomware due to the sensitive operations involved in the day to day processes of these industries. As the technology is evolving, more and more traditional industrial systems are replaced with advanced industry methods involving advanced technologies such as Internet of Things (IoT). These technology shift help improve business productivity and keep the company's global competitive in an overflowing competitive market. However, the systems involved need secure measures to protect integrity and availability which will help avoid any malfunctioning to their operations due to the cyber-attacks. There have been several cyber-attack incidents on healthcare, pharmaceutical, water cleaning and energy sector. These ICS' s are operated by remote control facilities and variety of other devices such as programmable logic controllers (PLC) and sensors to make a network. Cyber criminals are exploring vulnerabilities in the design of these ICS's to take the command and control of these systems and disrupt daily operations until ransomware is paid. This paper will provide critical analysis of the impact of Ransomware threat on SCADA systems.

SCADA systems are being constantly migrated to modern information and communication technologies (ICT) -based systems named cyber-physical systems. Unfortunately, this allows attackers to execute exploitation techniques into these architectures. In addition, ransomware insertion is nowadays the most popular attacking vector because it denies the availability of critical files and systems until attackers receive the demanded ransom. In this paper, it is analysed the risk impact of ransomware insertion into SCADA systems and it is suggested countermeasures addressed to the protection of SCADA systems and its components to reduce the impact of ransomware insertion.

In this cyber era, the cyber threats have reached a new level of menace and maturity. One of the major threat in this cyber world nowadays is ransomware attack which had affected millions of computers. Ransomware locks the valuable data with often unbreakable encryption codes making it inaccessible for both organization and consumers, thus demanding heavy ransom to decrypt the data. In this paper, advanced and improved version of the Petya ransomware has been introduced which has a reduced anti-virus detection of 33% which actually was 71% with the original version. System behavior is also monitored during the attack and analysis of this behavior is performed and described. Along with the behavioral analysis two mitigation strategies have also been proposed to defend the systems from the ransomware attack. This multi-layered approach for the security of the system will minimize the rate of infection as cybercriminals continue to refine their tactics, making it difficult for the organization's complacent development.

Cloud computing presents unlimited prospects for Information Technology (IT) industry and business enterprises alike. Rapid advancement brings a dark underbelly of new vulnerabilities and challenges unfolding with alarming regularity. Although cloud technology provides a ubiquitous environment facilitating business enterprises to conduct business across disparate locations, security effectiveness of this platform interspersed with threats which can bring everything that subscribes to the cloud, to a halt raises questions. However advantages of cloud platforms far outweighs drawbacks and study of new challenges helps overcome drawbacks of this technology. One such emerging security threat is of ransomware attack on the cloud which threatens to hold systems and data on cloud network to ransom with widespread damaging implications. This provides huge scope for IT security specialists to sharpen their skillset to overcome this new challenge. This paper covers the broad cloud architecture, current inherent cloud threat mechanisms, ransomware vulnerabilities posed and suggested methods to mitigate it.