Ransomware Prevention Tool

Pwn2Rule Info Club:
Ransomware Prevention Tool

IN THE LAST few months, waves

of ransomware attacks have pummeled the world, disrupting not just businesses but also vital services like hospital care, energy infrastructure, and telecoms.

Which means the research Andrea Continella and his team have pursued recently couldn't be better timed:

*A tool that detects ransomware automatically, almost instantly, and restores your system from backups before hackers can fully lock it down*

Called *ShieldFS*, the team's innovation isn't a broad antivirus platform, but that's by design.

Instead, it's a targeted feature that scans only for ransomware attacks.

By keeping the scope narrow, the project could focus on identifying the unique cryptographic behaviors of ransomware, which enables ShieldFS to detect not only known types, but also any new attacks that act in a ransomware-like manner.

The group, based out of the Politecnico di Milano in Italy, will present ShieldFS at the

*Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas on Wednesday*

"The contribution of the research is a set of indicators we have developed that can be used to tell very efficiently if a process is ransomware or if it’s a benign process," says Stefano Zanero, a systems security researcher who worked on the project.

By focusing on detecting the encryption itself, rather than simply cataloging specific ransomware types to look for, ShieldFS can preempt previously unseen versions, a valuable trait when even well-known ransomware schemes can turn much more aggressive, seemingly overnight