Swift population growth and rising demand for energy in the 21st century have resulted in considerable efforts to make the electrical grid more intelligent and responsive to accommodate consumers’ needs better while enhancing the reliability and efficiency of modern power systems. Internet of Things (IoT) has appeared as one of the enabling technologies for smart energy grids by delivering abundant cutting-edge solutions in various domains, including critical infrastructures. As IoT-enabled devices continue to flourish, one of the major challenges is security issues, since IoT devices are connected through the Internet, thus making the smart grids vulnerable to a diverse range of cyberattacks. Given the possible cascading consequences of shutting down a power system, a cyberattack on a smart grid would have disastrous implications for the stability of all grid-connected infrastructures. Most of the gadgets in our homes, workplaces, hospitals, and on trains require electricity to run. Therefore, the entire grid is subject to cyberattacks when a single device is hacked. Such attacks on power supplies may bring entire cities to a standstill, resulting in massive economic losses. As a result, security is an important element to address before the large-scale deployment of IoT-based devices in energy systems. In this report, first, we review the architecture and infrastructure of IoT-enabled smart grids; then, we focus on major challenges and security issues regarding their implementation. Lastly, as the main outcome of this study, we highlight the advanced solutions and technologies that can help IoT-enabled smart grids be more resilient and secure in overcoming existing cyber and physical attacks. In this regard, in the future, the broad implementation of cutting-edge secure and data transmission systems based on blockchain techniques is necessary to safeguard the entire electrical grid against cyber-physical adversaries.

The last few years have come with a sudden rise in ransomware attack incidents, causing significant financial losses to individuals, institutions and businesses. In reaction to these attacks, ransomware detection has become an important topic for research in recent years. Currently, there are two broad categories of ransomware detection techniques: signature-based and behaviour-based analyses. On the one hand, signature-based detection, which mainly relies on a static analysis, can easily be evaded by code-obfuscation and encryption techniques. On the other hand, current behaviour-based models, which rely mainly on a dynamic analysis, face difficulties in accurately differentiating between user-triggered encryption from ransomware-triggered encryption. In the current paper, we present an upgraded behavioural ransomware detection model that reinforces the existing feature space with a new set of features based on grouped registry key operations, introducing a monitoring model based on combined file entropy and file signature. We analyze the new feature model by exploring and comparing three different linear machine learning techniques: SVM, logistic regression and random forest. The proposed approach helps achieve improved detection accuracy and provides the ability to detect novel ransomware. Furthermore, the proposed approach helps differentiate user-triggered encryption from ransomware-triggered encryption, allowing saving as many files as possible during an attack. To conduct our study, we use a new public ransomware detection dataset collected in our lab, which consists of 666 ransomware and 103 benign binaries. Our experimental results show that our proposed approach achieves relatively high accuracy in detecting both previously seen and novel ransomware samples.