Title
CryptoLock (and Drop It): Stopping Ransomware Attacks on User Data
Abstract
Ransomware is a growing threat that encrypts auser's files and holds the decryption key until a ransom ispaid by the victim. This type of malware is responsible fortens of millions of dollars in extortion annually. Worse still, developing new variants is trivial, facilitating the evasion of manyantivirus and intrusion detection systems. In this work, we presentCryptoDrop, an early-warning detection system that alerts a userduring suspicious file activity. Using a set of behavior indicators, CryptoDrop can halt a process that appears to be tampering witha large amount of the user's data. Furthermore, by combininga set of indicators common to ransomware, the system can beparameterized for rapid detection with low false positives. Ourexperimental analysis of CryptoDrop stops ransomware fromexecuting with a median loss of only 10 files (out of nearly5,100 available files). Our results show that careful analysis ofransomware behavior can produce an effective detection systemthat significantly mitigates the amount of victim data loss.
Year
DOI
Venue
2016
10.1109/ICDCS.2016.46
2016 IEEE 36th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS)
Keywords
Field
DocType
ransomware,malware,intrusion detection,data protection,behavioral analysis
Extortion,Ransomware,Data loss,Computer security,Computer science,Computer network,Encryption,Malware,Data Protection Act 1998,Intrusion detection system,False positive paradox
Conference
ISSN
ISBN
Citations 
1063-6927
978-1-5090-1484-2
40
PageRank 
References 
Authors
2.44
31
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Nolen Scaife1979.67
Henry Carter226312.92
Patrick Traynor3117187.80
Kevin Butler467549.73