• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information Security & Cryptology
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• v.33 no.3
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• pp.499-510
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• 2023

Recently, an intelligent and advanced cyber attack attacks a computer network of a public institution using a file containing malicious code or leaks information, and the damage is increasing. Even in public institutions with various information protection systems, known attacks can be detected, but unknown dynamic and encryption attacks can be detected when existing signature-based or static analysis-based malware and ransomware file detection methods are used. vulnerable to The detection method proposed in this study extracts the detection result data of the system that can detect malicious code and ransomware among the information protection systems actually used by public institutions, derives various attributes by combining them, and uses a machine learning classification algorithm. Results are derived through experiments on how the derived properties are classified and which properties have a significant effect on the classification result and accuracy improvement. In the experimental results of this paper, although it is different for each algorithm when a specific attribute is included or not, the learning with a specific attribute shows an increase in accuracy, and later detects malicious code and ransomware files and abnormal behavior in the information protection system. It is expected that it can be used for property selection when creating algorithms.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.13 no.6
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• pp.3258-3279
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• 2019

Recently, ransomware has earned itself an infamous reputation as a force to reckon with in the cybercrime landscape. However, cybercriminals are adopting other unconventional means to seamlessly attain proceeds of cybercrime with little effort. Cybercriminals are now acquiring cryptocurrencies directly from benign Internet users without the need to extort a ransom from them, as is the case with ransomware. This paper investigates advances in the cryptovirology landscape by examining the state-of-the-art cryptoviral attacks. In our approach, we perform digital autopsy on the malware's source code and execute the different malware variants in a contained sandbox to deduce static and dynamic properties respectively. We examine three cryptoviral attack structures: browser-based crypto mining, memory resident crypto mining and cryptoviral extortion. These attack structures leave a trail of digital forensics evidence when the malware interacts with the file system and generates noise in form of network traffic when communicating with the C2 servers and crypto mining pools. The digital forensics evidence, which essentially are IOCs include network artifacts such as C2 server domains, IPs and cryptographic hash values of the downloaded files apart from the malware hash values. Such evidence can be used as seed into intrusion detection systems for mitigation purposes.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information Security & Cryptology
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• v.26 no.3
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• pp.645-653
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• 2016

Ransomware was first created in 1999, but its existence become widely known in Korean by 2015. As information and communication technology have developed, the storage capacity of computer has enlarged, it accordingly is getting more important to effectively manage these information, rather than the information itself. In such situation, the ransomware break into other people's computer and encrypt an files without a user's permission. So, it adversely affect the user. In this paper, we monitor an access of a specific process to the file. And on the basis of this monitoring information, we detect whether the abnormal approach happened. Through the detection result, we block the permission about access to the file for a specific process. Using this method, we propose a blocking technique for the ransomeware's abnormal approach and encryption to the files.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information Security & Cryptology
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• v.28 no.2
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• pp.357-367
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• 2018

As information technology of modern society develops, various malicious codes with the purpose of seizing or destroying important system information are developing together. Among them, ransomware is a typical malicious code that prevents access to user's resources. Although researches on detecting ransomware performing encryption have been conducted a lot in recent years, no additional methods have been proposed to recover damaged files after an attack. Also, because the similarity comparison technique was used without considering the repeated encryption, it is highly likely to be recognized as a normal behavior. Therefore, this paper implements a filter driver to control the file system and performs a similarity comparison method that is verified based on the analysis of the encryption pattern of the ransomware. We propose a system to detect the malicious process of the accessed process and recover the damaged file based on the cloud storage.

• Convergence Security Journal
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• v.23 no.2
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• pp.27-36
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• 2023

In recent years, ransomware attacks have become more organized and specialized, with the sophistication of attacks targeting specific individuals or organizations using tactics such as social engineering, spear phishing, and even machine learning, some operating as business models. In order to effectively respond to this, various researches and solutions are being developed and operated to detect and prevent attacks before they cause serious damage. In particular, honeypots can be used to minimize the risk of attack on IT systems and networks, as well as act as an early warning and advanced security monitoring tool, but in cases where ransomware does not have priority access to the decoy file, or bypasses it completely. has a disadvantage that effective ransomware response is limited. In this paper, this honeypot is optimized for the user environment to create a reliable real-time dynamic honeypot file, minimizing the possibility of an attacker bypassing the honeypot, and increasing the detection rate by preventing the attacker from recognizing that it is a honeypot file. To this end, four models, including a basic data collection model for dynamic honeypot generation, were designed (basic data collection model / user-defined model / sample statistical model / experience accumulation model), and their validity was verified.

• Convergence Security Journal
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• v.23 no.1
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• pp.117-123
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• 2023

To detect advanced ransomware attacks with machine learning-based models, the classification model must train learning data with high-dimensional feature space. And in this case, a 'curse of dimension' phenomenon is likely to occur. Therefore, dimensionality reduction of features must be preceded in order to increase the accuracy of the learning model and improve the execution speed while avoiding the 'curse of dimension' phenomenon. In this paper, we conducted classification of ransomware by applying three machine learning models and two feature extraction techniques to two datasets with extremely different dimensions of feature space. As a result of the experiment, the feature dimensionality reduction techniques did not significantly affect the performance improvement in binary classification, and it was the same even when the dimension of featurespace was small in multi-class clasification. However, when the dataset had high-dimensional feature space, LDA(Linear Discriminant Analysis) showed quite excellent performance.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information Security & Cryptology
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• v.32 no.3
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• pp.501-511
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• 2022

In 2021, ransomware attacks became popular, and the number is rapidly increasing every year. Since PowerShell is used as the primary ransomware technique, the need for PowerShell-based malware detection is ever increasing. However, the existing detection techniques have limits in that they cannot detect obfuscated scripts or require a long processing time for deobfuscation. This paper proposes a simple and fast deobfuscation method and a deep learning-based classification model that can detect PowerShell-based malware. Our technique is composed of Word2Vec and a convolutional neural network to learn the meaning of a script extracting important features. We tested the proposed model using 1400 malicious codes and 8600 normal scripts provided by the AI-based PowerShell malicious script detection track of the 2021 Cybersecurity AI/Big Data Utilization Contest. Our method achieved 5.04 times faster deobfuscation than the existing methods with a perfect success rate and high detection performance with FPR of 0.01 and TPR of 0.965.

• Journal of IKEEE
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• v.26 no.3
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• pp.380-388
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• 2022

The traditional malware detection technologies collect known malicious programs and analyze their characteristics. Then such a detection technology makes a blacklist based on the analyzed malicious characteristics and checks programs in the user's system based on the blacklist to determine whether each program is malware. However, such an approach can detect known malicious programs, but responding to unknown or variant malware is challenging. In addition, since such detection technologies generally monitor all programs in the system in real-time, there is a disadvantage that they can degrade the system performance. In order to solve such problems, various methods have been proposed to analyze major behaviors of malicious programs and to respond to them. The main characteristic of ransomware is to access and encrypt the user's file. So, a new approach is to produce the whitelist of programs installed in the user's system and allow the only programs listed on the whitelist to access the user's files. However, although it applies such an approach, attackers can still perform malicious behavior by performing a DLL(Dynamic-Link Library) injection attack on a regular program registered on the whitelist. This paper proposes a method to respond effectively to attacks using DLL injection.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Computer Information Conference
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• 2024.01a
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• pp.105-108
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• 2024

랜섬웨어는 Ransom(몸값)과 Software(소프트웨어)의 합성어로, 데이터를 암호화하여 이를 인질로 금전을 요구하는 악성 프로그램이다. 블랙캣(BlackCat)과 같은 랜섬웨어가 스위스 항공 서비스 기업의 시스템을 마비시키는 공격을 시도하였으며, 이와 같은 랜섬웨어로 인한 피해는 지속적으로 발생하고 있다. 랜섬웨어에 의한 피해 감소 및 방지를 위하여, 다양한 랜섬웨어 탐지방안이 등장하였으며, 최근 행위 기반 침입탐지 시스템에 인공지능 기술을 결합하여 랜섬웨어를 탐지하는 방안이 연구되는 실정이다. 인공지능 기술은 딥러닝 및 하드웨어의 발전으로 데이터를 처리할 수 있는 범위가 넓어지면서, 다양한 분야와 접목하여 랜섬웨어 탐지를 위한 시스템에 적용되고 있지만, 국내는 국외만큼 활발하게 연구되지 않고 연구 개발 단계에 머물러 있다. 따라서 본 논문에서는 랜섬웨어에 감염된 파일에서 나타나는 특징 중 하나인 엔트로피를 데이터 분석에 활용함으로써, 랜섬웨어를 탐지하는 시스템을 제안하고 설계하였다.

• Journal of Convergence for Information Technology
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• v.12 no.4
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• pp.126-132
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• 2022

At present, due to the rapid spread of smartphones and activation of IoT, malicious codes are disseminated using SNS, or intelligent intrusions such as intelligent APT and ransomware are in progress. The damage caused by the intelligent intrusion is also becoming more consequential, threatening, and emergent than the previous intrusion. Therefore, in this paper, we propose an intelligent intrusion situation-aware reasoning system to detect transgression behavior made by such intelligent malicious code. The proposed system was used to detect and respond to various intelligent intrusions at an early stage. The anticipated system is composed of an event monitor, event manager, situation manager, response manager, and database, and through close interaction between each component, it identifies the previously recognized intrusive behavior and learns about the new invasive activities. It was detected through the function to improve the performance of the inference device. In addition, it was found that the proposed system detects and responds to intelligent intrusions through the state of detecting ransomware, which is an intelligent intrusion type.