Advancing Crypto Ransomware with Multi Level Extortion: A Peril to Critical Infrastructure

Abstract

The world we are living in now has almost taken entirely into the digital world. Ransomware being a major threat to the security of digital information has now started to shake the economy of nations along with the disruption of essential needs. In the past few decades, there is a tremendous spike in the usage of ransomware for infecting critical infrastructures like hospitals and nuclear power plants causing the services to be encrypted and locked out. Ransom demands are made in huge amounts to obtain the decryption key and to restore the services. Since the discovery of the first ransomware in 1989, the financial loss it has created till now has been tremendous and continues to grow at an exponential rate. Alarmingly, ransomware has changed its pace from a malicious program to a perfect weapon to carry out cyber warfare across the world. Therefore, understanding the latest ransomware trends and securing the data from a ransomware attack is crucial in the current world. This paper aims to highlight the recent advances in ransomware, and its impact on critical infrastructure and focuses on a novel approach to categorize ransomware based on the level of extortion.