A Survey on Ransomware: Evolution, Taxonomy, and Defense Solutions
Harun Oz, Ahmet Aris, Albert Levi, A. Selcuk Uluagac

TL;DR
This comprehensive survey reviews ransomware evolution, taxonomy, and defense strategies across PCs, mobile devices, and IoT/CPS, highlighting research gaps and future directions in this critical cybersecurity domain.
Contribution
It provides the first complete overview of ransomware research across multiple platforms, analyzing 137 studies from 1990 to 2020 and identifying open issues for future work.
Findings
Detailed ransomware evolution and taxonomy
Analysis of defense mechanisms across platforms
Identification of key open research challenges
Abstract
In recent years, ransomware has been one of the most notorious malware targeting end users, governments, and business organizations. It has become a very profitable business for cybercriminals with revenues of millions of dollars, and a very serious threat to organizations with financial loss of billions of dollars. Numerous studies were proposed to address the ransomware threat, including surveys that cover certain aspects of ransomware research. However, no study exists in the literature that gives the complete picture on ransomware and ransomware defense research with respect to the diversity of targeted platforms. Since ransomware is already prevalent in PCs/workstations/desktops/laptops, is becoming more prevalent in mobile devices, and has already hit IoT/CPS recently, and will likely grow further in the IoT/CPS domain very soon, understanding ransomware and analyzing defense…
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