Ransomware Mitigation in the Modern Era: A Comprehensive Review, Research Challenges, and Future Directions

Although ransomware has been around since the early days of personal computers, its sophistication and aggression have increased substantially over the years. Ransomware, as a type of malware to extort ransom payments from victims, has evolved to deliver payloads in different attack vectors and on multiple platforms, and creating repeated disruptions and financial loss to many victims. Many studies have performed ransomware analysis and/or presented detection, defense, or prevention techniques for ransomware. However, because the ransomware landscape has evolved aggressively, many of those studies have become less relevant or even outdated. Previous surveys on anti-ransomware studies have compared the methods and results of the studies they surveyed, but none of those surveys has attempted to critique on the internal or external validity of those studies. In this survey, we first examined the up-to-date concept of ransomware, and listed the inadequacies in current ransomware research. We then proposed a set of unified metrics to evaluate published studies on ransomware mitigation, and applied the metrics to 118 such studies to comprehensively compare and contrast their pros and cons, with the attempt to evaluate their relative strengths and weaknesses. Finally, we forecast the future trends of ransomware evolution, and propose future research directions.

Future Crime in Cyber Security

As we all know nowadays everything is connected to the internet. Bits and bytes flow freely from one country to another country without any border guards. Technology progress has helped our world in many ways, but there are always two sides to everything. where there are good things. there are bad things also. In today’s society, we spend the majority of our time online, be it doing business, paying bills, making friends, selling cars, or purchasing a home, from applying to college to finding a life partner. Today’s criminals are taking the advantage of technology for crimes. The most often asked question is “What is the next big crime?” the answer in this paper. We covered some worst scenarios/cybercrimes you’ve never thought of. Before you begin with this paper, let us first tell you what this paper is not. It is not a guide on how to hack someone’s social media accounts, mobile devices, etc., or how to prevent yourself from hackers or cybercriminals. Yes, we covered some prevention techniques but, in the end, it all depends on you. This paper isn’t just what was going on yesterday or even what Is happening today. It is about where we are going tomorrow. This research paper throws light on the field of cybercrimes which are usually people don’t know.

Community Knowledge of and Attitudes towards COVID-19 Prevention Techniques in Saudi Arabia: A Cross-Sectional Study

The purpose of the study was to assess the community knowledge of and to obtain a broad overview of attitudes towards appropriate prevention techniques that are recommended by the Ministry of Health to prevent COVID-19 transmission in Saudi Arabia. Methods: A cross-sectional study using an online survey was conducted in Saudi Arabia between 1 May and 30 November 2020 to assess the community knowledge of and attitudes towards appropriate COVID-19 prevention techniques in Saudi Arabia. The study tool was developed based on an extensive literature review. Results: A total of 577 individuals were involved in this study. The majority of the participants knew that COVID-19 is classified as a severe acute respiratory syndrome, is caused by viral infection, and that it is more common among the elderly and those who have a chronic illness. More than half of the participants were able to identify the symptoms of COVID-19 correctly, which are fever, dry cough, and loss of taste. Approximately half the study participants were knowledgeable about appropriate distancing, handwashing, and preventive measures (e.g., wearing a cloth mask, smoking cessation, avoiding dangerous cultural behaviors that increase the probability of disease transmission). More than half of the study participants were able to identify the appropriate actions that should be taken if common COVID-19 symptoms appear. Conclusion: A promising level of knowledge and positive attitudes towards COVID-19 was observed in Saudi Arabia. Continuous efforts should be maintained to sustain the level of awareness among the public. Further studies are warranted to explore the level of knowledge and attitudes after the introduction of COVID-19 vaccines.

Comparative analysis on different software piracy prevention techniques

Numerous type of software piracy known today, have several prevention techniques which has been established against them. Although, different software piracy techniques have been established, but the choice of which one should be the best to develop any software is the challenge for most software developers. Consequently, example of the types of piracy in software development can be categorise as follows: cracks and serials, softlifting and hard disk loading, internet piracy and software forging, mischaneling, reverse engineering, and tampering. We have several types of prevention techniques which aimed to resolved piracy in software development, although the methods have been wrecked. In this work a critical analysis has been carryout on different software piracy techniques and a simple model software was designed using the best technique to validate the results of the analysis.