Trusted CI Webinar: The Technical Landscape of Ransomware: Threat Models and Defense Models

Miller, Barton P.; Heymann, Elisa R.

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/120029 Copy

Description

Title

Trusted CI Webinar: The Technical Landscape of Ransomware: Threat Models and Defense Models

Author(s)

• Miller, Barton P.
• Heymann, Elisa R.

Issue Date

2023-07-17

Keyword(s)

• Trusted CI
• webinar
• ransomware

Abstract

Ransomware has become a global problem. Given the reality that ransomware will eventually strike your system, we focus on recovery and not on prevention. The assumption is that the attacker did enter the system and rendered it inoperative to some extent. We start by presenting the broad landscape of how ransomware can affect a computer system, suggesting how the IT manager, system designer, and operator might prepare to recover from such an attack. We show the ways in which ransomware can (and sometimes cannot) attack each component of the systems. For each attack scenario, we describe how the system might be subverted, the ransom act, the impact on operations, difficulty of accomplishing the attack, the cost to recover, the ease of detection of the attack, and frequency in which the attack is found in the wild (if at all). We also describe strategies that could be used to recover from these attacks. Some of the ransomware scenarios that we describe reflect attacks that are common and well understood. Many of these scenarios have active attacks in the wild. Other scenarios are less common and do not appear to have any active attacks. In many ways, these less common scenarios are the most interesting ones as they pose an opportunity to build defenses ahead of attacks. The Ransomware Report discussed during the presentation is here: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8140464 And, the latest version of our Guide to Securing Scientific Software, is here: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8137009

Type of Resource

• text
• still image

Language

en

Sponsor(s)/Grant Number(s)

NSF Grant # 2241313

Copyright and License Information

©2023 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-­NonCommercial 3.0 Unported (CC BY­NC 3.0) license.

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