Book Image

Preventing Ransomware

By : Abhijit Mohanta, Mounir Hahad, Kumaraguru Velmurugan
Book Image

Preventing Ransomware

By: Abhijit Mohanta, Mounir Hahad, Kumaraguru Velmurugan

Overview of this book

<p><span id="description" class="sugar_field">Ransomware has turned out to be the most aggressive malware and has affected numerous organizations in the recent past. The current need is to have a defensive mechanism in place for workstations and servers under one organization.</span></p> <p><span class="sugar_field"><span id="description" class="sugar_field">This book starts by explaining the basics of malware, specifically ransomware. The book provides some quick tips on malware analysis and how you can identify different kinds of malware. We will also take a look at different types of ransomware, and how it reaches your system, spreads in your organization, and hijacks your computer. We will then move on to how the ransom is paid and the negative effects of doing so. You will learn how to respond quickly to ransomware attacks and how to protect yourself. The book gives a brief overview of the internals of security software and Windows features that can be helpful in ransomware prevention for administrators. You will also look at practical use cases in each stage of the ransomware phenomenon. The book talks in detail about the latest ransomware attacks involving WannaCry, Petya, and BadRabbit.</span></span></p> <p><span id="description" class="sugar_field">By the end of this book, you will have end-to-end knowledge of the trending malware in the tech industry at present.</span></p>
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Title Page
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

3. Web attacks


Malware is also delivered through web attacks. Attacks can leverage vulnerabilities in websites and browsers to execute the attack.

A web application is hosted on a web server and, as a result, we get a website. A web application is composed of web pages, databases, and several subcomponents. Web pages are created using PHP, HTML, Java, JavaScript, and so on. A database for a website can be created using MySQL, Postgres SQL, and MongoDB. Joomla, WordPress, and Drupal are some popular readily available web applications. People can use these as templates and modify them to create their websites as per their requirements. Apache Tomcat, JBoss, and Microsoft IIS are some of the famous web servers. A vulnerability in a web application, web page, database, or web server can expose the website to attack. We term these kinds of vulnerabilities as server-side vulnerabilities. Attackers can use these vulnerabilities to compromise the website. They can get the credentials of the users...