Systematic Memory Forensic Analysis of Ransomware using Digital Forensic Tools

Abstract

Cybercrimes catastrophically caused great financial loss in the year 2018 as powerful obfuscated malware known as ransomware continued to be a continual threat to governments and organizations. Advanced malwares capable of system encryption with sophisticated obscure keys left organizations paying the ransom that hackers demand. Since every individual is vulnerable to this assault, cyber forensics play a vital role either in educating society or combating the attacks. As cyber forensics is classified into many subdomains, memory forensics is the domain that leads in curbing these types of attacks. This article gives insight on importance of memory forensics and provides widespread analysis on working of ransomware, recognizes the workflow, provides the ways to overcome this attack. Furthermore, this article implements user defined rules by integrating into powerful search tools known as YARA to detect and prevent the ransomware attacks.