Ransomware attacks on cloud-encrypted data pose a significant risk to the security and privacy of cloud-based businesses and their consumers. We present RANSOMNET+, a state-of-the-art hybrid model that combines Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) with pre-trained transformers, to efficiently take on the challenging issue of ransomware attack classification. RANSOMNET+ excels over other models because it combines the greatest features of both architectures, allowing it to capture hierarchical features and local patterns. Our findings demonstrate the exceptional capabilities of RANSOMNET+. The model had a fantastic precision of 99.5%, recall of 98.5%, and F1 score of 97.64%, and attained a training accuracy of 99.6% and a testing accuracy of 99.1%. The loss values for RANSOMNET+ were impressively low, ranging from 0.0003 to 0.0035 throughout training and testing. We tested our model against the industry standard, ResNet 50, as well as the state-of-the-art, VGG 16. RANSOMNET+ excelled over the other two models in terms of F1 score, accuracy, precision, and recall. The algorithm’s decision-making process was also illuminated by RANSOMNET+’s interpretability analysis and graphical representations. The model’s openness and usefulness were improved by the incorporation of feature distributions, outlier detection, and feature importance analysis. Finally, RANSOMNET+ is a huge improvement in cloud safety and ransomware research. As a result of its unrivaled accuracy and resilience, it provides a formidable line of defense against ransomware attacks on cloud-encrypted data, keeping sensitive information secure and ensuring the reliability of cloud-stored data. Cybersecurity professionals and cloud service providers now have a reliable tool to combat ransomware threats thanks to this research.

Data security assurance is crucial due to the increasing prevalence of cloud computing and its widespread use across different industries, especially in light of the growing number of cybersecurity threats. A major and ever-present threat is Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) assaults, which enable even individuals with minimal technical knowledge to conduct ransomware operations. This study provides a new approach for RaaS attack detection which uses an ensemble of deep learning models. For this purpose, the network intrusion detection dataset “UNSW-NB15” from the Intelligent Security Group of the University of New South Wales, Australia is analyzed. In the initial phase, the rectified linear unit-, scaled exponential linear unit-, and exponential linear unit-based three separate Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) models are developed. Later, using the combined predictive power of these three MLPs, the RansoDetect Fusion ensemble model is introduced in the suggested methodology. The proposed ensemble technique outperforms previous studies with impressive performance metrics results, including 98.79% accuracy and recall, 98.85% precision, and 98.80% F1-score. The empirical results of this study validate the ensemble model’s ability to improve cybersecurity defenses by showing that it outperforms individual MLP models. In expanding the field of cybersecurity strategy, this research highlights the significance of combined deep learning models in strengthening intrusion detection systems against sophisticated cyber threats.

COVID-19, over time, has spread around multiple countries and has affected a large number of humans. It has influenced diverse people’s lives, consisting of social, behavioral, physical, mental, and economic aspects. In this study, we aim to analyze one such social impact: the behavioral aspects of agriculture stakeholders during the pandemic period in the Indian region. For this purpose, we have gathered agriculture-related tweets from Twitter in three phases: (a) initial phase, (b) mid-phase, and (c) later phase, where these phases are related to the period of complete lockdown implemented in India in the year 2020. Afterward, we applied machine-learning-based qualitative-content-based methods to analyze the sentiments, emotions, and views of these people. The outcomes depicted the presence of highly negative emotions in the initial phase of the lockdown, which signifies fear of insecurity among the agriculture stakeholders. However, a decline in unhappiness was noted during the later phase of the lockdown. Furthermore, these outcomes will help policymakers to obtain insights into the behavioral responses of agricultural stakeholders. They can initiate primitive and preventive actions accordingly, to tackle such issues in the future.