Trends in design of ransomware viruses.

The ransomware nightmare is taking over the internet, impacting common users, small businesses and large ones. The interest and investment which is pushed into this market each month, tell us a few things about the evolution of both technical and social engineering, along with what is to expect in the short-coming future from them. In this paper, we analyze how ransomware programs developed in the last few years and how they were released in certain market segments throughout the deep web via RaaS (Ransomware as a Service), exploits or SPAM, while learning from their own mistakes to bring profit to the next level. We also highlight a set of mistakes that were made, which allowed for total or partial recovery of the encrypted data. We also consider the ransomware authors preference for specific encryption types, encryption key exchange mechanisms and some edge cases of encryption, which may prove to be exploitable in the near future.