Cloud computing is one of the most trendy terminologies. Cloud providers aim to satisfy clients' requirements for computing resources such as services, applications, networks, storage and servers. They offer the possibility of leasing these resources rather than buying them. Many popular companies, such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft, began to enhance their services and apply the technology of cloud computing to provide cloud environment for their customers. Although there are lots of advantages in using a cloud-based system, some issues must be handled before organisations and individuals have the trust to deploy their systems in cloud computing. Security, privacy, power efficiency, compliance and integrity are among those important issues. In this paper, we focus on cloud computing along with its deployment and delivery models. A comparison between cloud computing with other computing models is presented, this is in addition to a survey on different major security issues, challenges and risks which currently pose threats to the cloud industry. Moreover, we discuss cloud security requirements and their importance for deployment and delivery models. Finally, we present cloud computing security future trends and research openings.

Ransomware is a strain of malware that disables access to the user’s resources after infiltrating a victim’s system. Ransomware is one of the most dangerous malware organizations face by blocking data access or publishing private data over the internet. The major challenge of any entity is how to decrypt the files encrypted by ransomware. Ransomware’s binary analysis can provide a means to characterize the relationships between different features used by ransomware families to track the ransomware encryption mechanism routine. In this paper, we compare the different ransomware detection approaches and techniques. We investigate the criteria, parameters, and tools used in the ransomware detection ecosystem. We present the main recommendations and best practices for ransomware mitigation. In addition, we propose an efficient ransomware indexing system that provides search functionalities, similarity checking, sample classification, and clustering. The new system scheme mainly targets native ransomware binaries, and the indexing engine depends on hybrid data from the static analyzer system. Our scheme tracks and classifies ransomware based on static features to find the similarity between different ransomware samples. This is done by calculating the absolute Jaccard index. Results have shown that Import Address Table (IAT) feature can be used to classify different ransomware more accurately than the Strings feature.

Recently, ransomware attacks are on the rise hitting critical infrastructures and organizations globally. Ransomware uses advanced encryption techniques to encrypt important files on the targeted computer, then it requests payment to decrypt the encrypted files again. Therefore, the detection and prevention of ransomware attacks represent major challenges for security researchers. This research proposes a novel static-based rules ransomware detection framework. The decision rules of the proposed framework are based on static features extracted from the ransomware files. When scanned file reached rules threshold, the framework evaluates triggered rules through logical operations to assign a score for each file. Every score represents a confidence level whether this file is ransomware or not from critical to low. The proposed framework has proven that it can detect new families based on rules and logical operations with high accuracy and detection ratio.

Ransomware is a type of malicious software that encrypts a victim’s files and demands payment in exchange for the decryption key. It is a rapidly growing and evolving threat that has caused significant damage and disruption to individuals and organizations around the world. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive ransomware classification approach based on the comparison of similarity matrices derived from static, dynamic analysis, and visualization. Our approach involves the use of multiple analysis techniques to extract features from ransomware samples and to generate similarity matrices based on these features. These matrices are then compared using a variety of comparison algorithms to identify similarities and differences between the samples. The resulting similarity scores are then used to classify the samples into different categories, such as families, variants, and versions. We evaluate our approach using a dataset of ransomware samples and demonstrate that it can accurately classify the samples with a high degree of accuracy. One advantage of our approach is the use of visualization, which allows us to classify and cluster large datasets of ransomware in a more intuitive and effective way. In addition, static analysis has the advantage of being fast and accurate, while dynamic analysis allows us to classify and cluster packed ransomware samples. We also compare our approach to other classification approaches based on single analysis techniques and show that our approach outperforms these approaches in terms of classification accuracy. Overall, our study demonstrates the potential of using a comprehensive approach based on the comparison of multiple analysis techniques, including static analysis, dynamic analysis, and visualization, for the accurate and efficient classification of ransomware. It also highlights the importance of considering multiple analysis techniques in the development of effective ransomware classification methods, especially when dealing with large datasets and packed samples.