Crypto-Ransomware: A Revision of the State of the Art. Advances and Challenges

Resumen

According to the premise that the first step to try to solve a problem is to deepen its knowledge as much as possible, this work is mainly aimed at diving and understanding crypto-ransomware, a very true world digital pandemic at present from several perspectives. With this aim, we review the fundamentals of this security threat: typologies and families, attack model and involved actors, lifecycle stages. Moreover, its evolution in the last years is afterwards discussed, and main milestones regarding the development of new variants and real cases occurred are highlighted. Also, the most relevant and current proposals appeared to fight against this scourge are presented, they being organized in the usual defense lines: prevention, detection, response and recovery. Finally, current trends in ransomware infection and development as well as main challenges to be necessarily dealt with to reduce the impact of crypto-ransomware are discussed. All of that will contribute to better understand the situation and, from it, to develop more adequate attack procedures and effective solutions and tools to defeat attacks.