Ransomware: An illustration of malicious cryptography

Abstract

Malware are the serious threat to the computer systems. Malware are written for many reasons: for stealing confidential data, for financial gain or to affect the working of the computer system. Ransomware is the most disastrous kind of malware which encrypts the user’s whole data and demands ransom (money) to decrypt the data. The user has to pay ransom for getting the decryption key. This becomes the nuisance of encryption algorithms which are used in ransomware attacks. In this paper, a study of ransomware malware is done with the perspective of encryption algorithms.