A Survey of Ransomware as a Service (RaaS) and Methods to Mitigate the Attack

ABSTRACT

Industries all around the world seek realistic predictions for new threats that might appear in new future that will affect their business and the security of their data. Year 2020 was full of uncertainty due the Covid19 pandemic, entire world had to change the way they do business by shifting to the digital world. The new working methods introduced new threats which will persist, and potential continue to grow in coming few years. Cyber security predictions address challenges and threats caused by the pandemic such as the huge increase of ransomware attacks in the coming year. Almost every organization changed their option to access work and used new software that will allow them to operate from home. Education sector for example uses virtual classes, healthcare sector use web to deliver and communicate with patients and so on. The more individuals and business rely on technology, the more it becomes part of their lives and cannot be replaced. Cyber criminals realized this fact and increased the demand for higher ransom. The goal of this paper is to study the trend and the influence of Ransomware as a service in today era. This paper is proposed steps to reduce the impact of Ransomware attack to individuals and organizations. The discussion on how ransomware as a service work, statistic of ransomware cases, methods of improving operational security of the organizations and technical countermeasures that should be taken by organization and also individuals are included in this research paper. © 2021 IEEE.