Evolving Threat Agents: Ransomware and their Variants

Abstract

This paper studies different kinds of ransomware attacks right from its point of origin to the latest kind of ransomware attacks. As this malware threat has reported a significant increase in the number of report incidents happenings in countries like USA, UK and India. A study of its evolution provides for its first line of defense. So the paper offers an awareness of different kinds of ransomware variants from 1989 to 2017. It also analyses the effects of this malware on Android and Windows platform. After describing these variants it also presents the attack vectors of the Ransomware revolution. The paper also provides guidelines on preventing the losses by avoiding infection. General