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

2. Antivirus


Antivirus is a very well known thing today and does not need any definition. We will look into the internals of an antivirus engine. We won't involve coding stuff here, but there will be some references to some readily available code so that people who are interested can research more about it. We will explain the concepts with respect to Windows.

Here is how an antivirus engine works. When a file arrives at a system, even before the file is written to the disk, the antivirus picks it up if real-time scanning is enabled. After that, the antivirus calls its file scanning engine to scan the file against the signatures it has. If the signature matches, then the file is deleted or quarantined. Sometimes the user can ask the antivirus to scan the system. The antivirus can scan the entire file system and process virtual memory. If it identifies malware, it takes action against it. This is called cleaning.

Antivirus software can have the following scanning engines:

  • File scanner
  • Memory...