Hybrid Evolutionary Approach in Feature Vector for Ransomware Detection

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 Naive 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.