Abhijit Mohanta - Preventing Ransomware

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First published: March 2018

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Abhijit Mohanta has a decade of experience in cybersecurity. He works as a security researcher at Juniper Networks. He has worked with Cyphort (now part of Juniper), McAfee, and Symantec as a security researcher. His expertise includes reverse-engineering, automation, malware analysis, Microsoft Windows programming, and machine learning. He has worked on antivirus, sandboxes, and intrusion prevention systems. He has also authored a number of blogs about malware and has a couple of patents pending related to malware detection.

Mounir Hahad head of threat research at Juniper Networks, is a cybersecurity expert focused on malware research, detection techniques, and threat intelligence. Prior to joining Juniper, he was the head of threat research at Cyphort, a company focused on advanced threat detection and security analytics. He has also held various leadership positions at Cisco and IronPort working on VPN, UTM, email, and web security. He holds a PhD in computer science from the University of Rennes in France.

Kumaraguru Velmurugan has over 10 years of experience in malware analysis and remedial measures. He has been associated with different antivirus and sandbox products in his career. He is a passionate reverse engineer and is interested in assembly programming and automation in the cybersecurity domain. He has authored and assisted technically in blogging about interesting key features employed by malware and owns a patent on malware remedial measures.

Himanshu Sharma has achieved fame for finding security loopholes and vulnerabilities in Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Adobe, Uber, AT&T, Avira, and many more. He has gained worldwide recognition through his hacking skills. He was a speaker at Botconf '13, held in Nantes, France and at IEEE Conference in California and Malaysia, as well as for TedX. Currently, he is the cofounder of BugsBountya crowd-sourced security platform for ethical hackers and companies interested in cyber services. He has also authored Kali Linux - An Ethical Hacker's Cookbook, by Packt Publishing.

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Ransomware is an exponentially growing threat. Year upon year, new kinds of ransomware are introduced to the web by cybercriminals. 2016 saw an increase in CryptoLocker variants. 2017 saw the volcanic outbreak of WannaCry, NotPetya, and BadRabbit affecting all parts of the globe. The book talks about various kinds of ransomware and technologies used by ransomware. This book covers case studies of the latest ransomware outbreaks.

This book does not directly jump into ransomware but starts by building an understanding around it. Ransomware is a category of malware. This book talks about all the aspects of ransomware, what technology they use, categories of ransomware, and how ransomware is spread. This helps to build up an understanding of ransomware so that readers can understand how to fight the threat.

This book is for administrators and response teams. Administrators need to understand the types of security software and the configuration needed to protect their organizations. Response teams need to identify the incident and take further steps. This book is also meant for security enthusiasts and other IT professionals who want to know about malware, particularly ransomware.