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

6. Honeypots


Other security software can include honeypots. A honeypot is a decoy, a system that has a number of pieces of software executing on it, such as a web server, FTP server, and so on. The attackers may mistake these servers hosted on a honeypot to be real servers and carry out an attack on it and be identified. This kind of honeypot can be deployed on the network.

There is some research going on into host-based honeypots for protecting against crypto-ransomware. These can be deployed on desktops. Crypto-ransomware usually targets documents such as text, PDF, and Office documents on your system. The honeypots create a folder on the system that has a few documents and can contain other types of files too. We can refer to these as decoy files. The honeypot process always runs its process on the system that keeps an eye on these decoy files. If any process tries to modify any of these files, it can terminate the process or trigger an alert related to the process.