Data Aware Defense (DaD): Towards a Generic and Practical Ransomware Countermeasure

Aurélien Palisse (1) , Antoine Durand (2) , Hélène Le Bouder (3) , Colas Le Guernic (1, 4) , Jean-Louis Lanet (1)

1 TAMIS - Threat Analysis and Mitigation for Information Security
2 ENSEIRB - Ecole Nationale Supérieure d'Electronique, Informatique et Radiocommunications de Bordeaux
3 IMT Atlantique - SRCD - Département Systèmes Réseaux, Cybersécurité et Droit du numérique
4 DGA.MI - DGA Maîtrise de l'information

We present the Malware - O - Matic analysis platform and the Data Aware Defense ransomware countermeasure based on real time data gathering with as little impact as possible on system performance. Our solution monitors (and blocks if necessary) file system activity of all userland threads with new indicators of compromise. We successfully detect 99.37% of our 798 active ransomware samples with at most 70 MB lost per sample’s thread in 90% of cases, or less than 7 MB in 70% of cases. By a careful analysis of the few false negatives we show that some ransomware authors are specifically trying to hide ongoing encryption. We used free (as in free beer) de facto industry standard benchmarks to evaluate the impact of our solution and enable fair comparisons. In all but the most demanding tests the impact is marginal

Keywords: Ransomware

Domains: Networking and Internet Architecture [cs.NI]; Cryptography and Security [cs.CR]

Aurélien Palisse, Antoine Durand, Hélène Le Bouder, Colas Le Guernic, Jean-Louis Lanet. Data Aware Defense (DaD): Towards a Generic and Practical Ransomware Countermeasure. NordSec2017 : 22nd Nordic Conference on Secure IT Systems, Nov 2017, Tartu, Estonia. pp.192-208, ⟨10.1007/978-3-319-70290-2_12⟩. ⟨hal-01814009⟩