Ransomware: Challenges, Human Impacts, and Future Recommendations

This report delves into the multifaceted challenges posed by ransomware, a malicious software that demands payment for the return of stolen data. It explores the significant impact of ransomware on human lives, including data loss, privacy breaches, and financial repercussions. The report examines the challenges in research, including the evolution of ransomware variants and the shift from individual to organizational targets. It presents current research findings and solutions, such as data recovery techniques, precautionary measures, and the importance of cybersecurity education and robust network security. The report identifies gaps in the research, particularly the need for more discussion on the role of emerging technologies in combating ransomware. It concludes with recommendations for future research, including leveraging advanced technologies like AI to detect and mitigate ransomware attacks, and emphasizes the need for proactive measures to protect data and ensure a secure digital environment. The report also highlights the need for more research on how to track down the hackers. The report analyzes the potential for using similar technologies to track cybercriminals, and the development of more advanced technologies to mitigate these attacks.

Running head: RANSOMWARE AND HUMAN IMPACTS
Ransomware and Human Impacts
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Table of Contents
Introduction:....................................................................................................................................2
Challenges and Problems in Research Topic:.................................................................................2
Literature Gaps:...............................................................................................................................3
Current research findings and solutions......................................................................................4
Precautionary Measures...............................................................................................................5
Gap in the research:.....................................................................................................................6
Summary and Future Recommendations.........................................................................................6
References:......................................................................................................................................8

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Introduction:
Technology, one of the biggest gift to the makind is one of biggest threat as well. the
technological advancement has lead to the development of numnerous technologies which has
been used in different sectors. These technologies have helped in the process of business
development, sectors of education as well, making life much easier for the human being.
However, there are certain adverse effect of the technology as well, and ransomware is one such
aspect of the technology which has been developed with an intention to dirupt the services
(Subedi et al. 2017). Ransomware belongs to a specific class of malware which demands
payments in order to return the stolen data assets from a system of organization.In this report we
will discuss about some of the challenges of the Ransomware that affects the human. We will
discuss about certain recommendations and future work regarding this topic of discussion as
well.
Challenges and Problems in Research Topic:
As introduced, the ransomware is a malware which accepts payments while returning the
lost data or hacked data. it is considered to be one of the most common attacks in the cyber
world. It also considered to be one of the most high priority risks of all time which has to be
checked immediately to prevent the malware from fucntioning further. In this section we will
discuss abot certain challenges that the Ransomware poses to the day to day activities of the
human.
One of the major impact of the Ransomware is the loss of the data. As we have discussed
earlier, the Ransomware attacks the databases and steal the data. The hacker steals the data and
changes the cryptographic key (Berrueta et al. 2019). By soing so, they prevent the data to be

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accessed by the authorised user. In order to retain that key the company or the person who is
victimized have to pay the hacker a huge amount of money. This transactions are mainly
performed using the bitcoins and are thus not traceable. One the data is stolen or encrypted by
the hackers, until and unless it is recovered, it remains exposed to third party. Thereby
hampering the privacy and the integrity of the data. infact the confidentiality of the data is lost
due to this attack (O'Gorman & McDonald, 2012). However, it may happen tat the attacker may
misuse the data for the usage in the criminal activites.
The busienss databses or the health databases consists of the sensitive information
regarding the customers like their addresses, transaction details and many more information
which is not worth sharing to the third party wthout the authorization. These can be used by the
hacker to extract information and even money with the help of the credit card details present in
the databases. As per the reports, 40% of the company were attacked with malware in the year
2015. The suffering countries included, United Kingdom, United States, Canada, Germany and
many more.
Literature Gaps:
According to Richardsonm & North, 2017, ransomware itself has a numerous variants,
and the majority of them are pendent on the encryption of the data which was the initial strategy
of the ransomware development for the extortion of the data. The technology is also capable of
encryption of the entire hard drive of the computer system or Computer’s Master File Table or
MFT, making a DOS attack which is very expensive for the company if they have no data stored
in the back up.

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As described by Arabo et al., 2020, the attack is mainly carried out with the help of the
Trojan which is disguised as the legitimate file. However, the encryption techniques which were
developed for the protection of the data is used by these hackers to encrypt the data in such a
way that the authorized users are incapable of using them. The ransomware has however shifted
its focus from the individual victims to organization making the impact of the attack higher than
ever. As per the reports generated by the federal Bureau of Investigation, a sum of $1 billion
United States Dollar has been lost due to the ransomware attack in 2016. According to
Sabharwal and Sharma 2020, PC Cyborg is the first ever Ransomware that as detected and
reported. Apart from that, GP Code, Reveton, Locker ransomware, Crypto ransomware,
cryptolockers and numerous others were detected slowly and gradually making the attack more
and more severe.
Current research findings and solutions
A research was conducted to find out how a target is vulnerable to Crypto ransomware
attacks. The data present in the computer of the victim user can be prevented from access by
encrypting them using encrypting tools present in the computer. But those data can be recovered
after the name of the tool developing shadow copies of the data is changed. Another research
shows the ways to prevent such ransomware attacks and also shows all the features and
information present in the Crypto Lockers.
If a business organization or an individual user is not prepared for cyber attacks by
developing proper plans and strategies, properly educating others and also solidify the security of
the network through rules and policies, then it is very much prone to cyber attacks and invasive
approaches. According to a research more than sixty percent of cyber attacks happen when the
ransomware gets access to a computer through various drive-by downloads which are operated

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by Exploit Kits or EK which is implemented by the control panel according to the vulnerability
of the computer. In this research, a framework was made to find out the Rig EK communication
that were harmful for the computer and thus prevent encryption of data (Al-rimy, Maarof &
Shaid, 2018).
Another research showed two counter measures to the ransomware attacks which could
be achieved by call interceptions from Microsoft’s Cryptographic API respectively and also by
using all the weaknesses of the malware working operations. Several researches were conducted
though none of them could properly show the impact of ransomware attacks on humans.
A research development of R-PackDroid was done to find out the ransomware attacks on
Android systems and separate them from generic malware attacks by using machine learning
approach. Another method of recovering data after malware or ransomware attack was given in
another research. A key backup technique which copies the encryption keys to the data allowing
decrypting of data after it has been encrypted by a ransomware. It is based on cloud analysis
system detection and analysis of abnormal system behavior. It is more secure and the monitoring
of server, files and network takes place at the same time reducing chances of attack as well. The
cloud system also analyses data originating from the device of the user (Ball et al., 2020).
Precautionary Measures
Data recovery after cyber attacks is very important. In order to do so, offline and online
data backup along with proper functioning of detection tools and defense mechanism must be
active all the time. Minimization of threats and exposure must be done as much as possible
through IP address and website blocking, endpoint protection and common sense. The defense
systems of the organizations should be as impenetrable as possible by using firewalls, IPS, anti-

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virus and filtering of emails and web (Valach, 2016). Proper system configuration and hardening
of the device to prevent unauthorized access should be implemented.
Proper education regarding ransomware attacks how to tackle them must be present in
every user of computer. Organizations should take this seriously and follow processes and
policies to do so. Users should understand which are the software and websites that are safe or
unsafe for working (Kansagra, Kumhar & Jha, 2016). They must educate themselves as well as
their team if the need be in order to handle any ransomware attack and prevent them in future.
Organizations must have a system which could look after and analyze the abnormal activities
like non-human malicious activities or quick encryption of data in order to avoid ransomware
attacks which are evolving and adapting quickly (Kim et al. 2019). Offline data should be
protected. Unstructured files like spreadsheet, documents, presentations and others must be
safely stored and access to personal data must be limited. All these would make it much difficult
for any hacker or attacker to steal or modify data.
Gap in the research:
All these research has shown how the attacks have taken place or how the variants of the
attacks have had an impact upon the organizations and how it has adversely imoacted the human
being. But the improvement of the technologies and the advent of more secured technologies
with enhnaced security features have not been discussed in many of the reseraches as yet. It does
not discusses about the ways in which the FBI can use these techniques to track down the
hackers as well. These are the major gas in the literature that has been discovered.
Summary and Future Recommendations:

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From the above discussion we can conclude that the technology can be harsh as well. The
advancement of the technology have however being one of the most important stage in the
development of the digital world, but it has given rise to the hacker activities involving most
destructive ad manipulative technology like the ransomware. Ransomware has been one of the
greatest issues which are having a devastating impact on the lives of the human. However,
researches have been conducted to find the measures for prevention of the attack in the
organizations and individual computers such that the data can be protected and the results that
have been obtained from the researches are depicted as well (Hampton, Baig & Zeadally, 2018).
However, the research has opened a new door way by which the similar technologies can be used
to track down the activities of the cyber criminals causing the attack. More improved
technologies can be developed for the mitigation of this attack, or the technologies can be
developed which can make use of the artificial intelligence to sense the files which can be the
source of the ransomware attacks on the data leading to the damage to the information databases.
The evolution of the technologies in the medical sciences and the other department of the
industry has proven that nothing is impossible in the contemporary world. Thus we can for sure
count on them for the purpose of the development in the field of the cyber security to protect the
human and their organizational databases from the threshold of the ransomware.

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References:
Al-rimy, B. A. S., Maarof, M. A., & Shaid, S. Z. M. (2018). Ransomware threat success factors,
taxonomy, and countermeasures: A survey and research directions. Computers &
Security, 74, 144-166.
Arabo, A., Dijoux, R., Poulain, T., & Chevalier, G. (2020). Detecting Ransomware Using
Process Behavior Analysis.
Ball, M., Boyle, E., Degwekar, A., Deshpande, A., Rosen, A., Vaikuntanathan, V., &
Vasudevan, P. N. (2020). Cryptography from Information Loss. In 11th Innovations in
Theoretical Computer Science Conference (ITCS 2020). Schloss Dagstuhl-Leibniz-
Zentrum für Informatik.
Berrueta, E., Morato, D., Magaña, E., & Izal, M. (2019). A Survey on Detection Techniques for
Cryptographic Ransomware. IEEE Access, 7, 144925-144944.
Hampton, N., Baig, Z., & Zeadally, S. (2018). Ransomware behavioural analysis on windows
platforms. Journal of information security and applications, 40, 44-51.
Kansagra, D., Kumhar, M., & Jha, D. (2016). Ransomware: A Threat to Cyber security. CS
Journals, 7(1).
Kim, D., Kim, Y. H., Shin, D., & Shin, D. (2019). Fast attack detection system using log analysis
and attack tree generation. Cluster Computing, 22(1), 1827-1835.
O'Gorman, G., & McDonald, G. (2012). Ransomware: A growing menace. Symantec
Corporation.

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Richardson, R., & North, M. M. (2017). Ransomware: Evolution, mitigation and
prevention. International Management Review, 13(1), 10.
Sabharwal, S. and Sharma, S., 2020. Ransomware Attack: India Issues Red Alert. In Emerging
Technology in Modelling and Graphics (pp. 471-484). Springer, Singapore.
Subedi, K. P., Budhathoki, D. R., Chen, B., & Dasgupta, D. (2017, November). RDS3:
Ransomware defense strategy by using stealthily spare space. In 2017 IEEE Symposium
Series on Computational Intelligence (SSCI) (pp. 1-8). IEEE.
Valach, A. P. (2016). What to do after a ransomware attacks. Risk Management, 63(5), 12-14.