Paper 2018/125

Challenges in cyber security - Ransomware Phenomenon

Pasca Vlad-Raul and Simion Emil

Abstract

Ransomware has become one of the major threats nowadays due to its huge impact and increased rate of infections around the world. CryptoWall 3, was responsible for damages of over 325 millions of dollars, since its discovery in 2015. Recently, another family of ransomware appeared in the cyber space which is called WannaCry over 230.000 computers around the world, in over 150 countries were infected. Ransomware usually uses the RSA algorithm to protect the encryption key and AES for encrypting the files. If these algorithms are correctly implemented then it is impossible to recover the encrypted information. Some attacks, nonetheless, work against the implementation of RSA. These attacks are not against the basic algorithm, but against the protocol. In the following sections we present the fully analysis on three representative ransomware: Spora, DMA Locker and WannaCry.