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<p>Crypto ransomware poses an escalating threat to individuals and organizations, yet existing defenses remain fundamentally reactive. Anti-ransomware tools, such as <i>CryptoDrop</i>, <i>R-Locker</i>, <i>CryptoStopper</i>, and <i>Cybereason RansomFree</i>, are constrained by reliance on user intervention, vulnerability to slow-encryption and obfuscation evasion techniques, and the risk of volatile memory loss through forced system shutdowns. The growing adoption of double-extortion tactics, wherein ransomware operators both encrypt victim data and threaten public disclosure of exfiltrated information, further exposes critical gaps in current defenses. This paper introduces the <i>Ransomware Prevention Toolkit (RPTK)</i>, a proactive hybrid solution that addresses these limitations by turning ransomware own behavioral tendencies against it. RPTK’s core novelty lies in its camouflage mechanism, which disguises critical files as system files through metadata alterations, signature modifications, and extension changes, exploiting the well-documented ransomware convention of sparing system files to maintain host operability. This prevents encryption and mitigates data exfiltration risk. A complementary monitoring service, disguised as a legitimate system process, autonomously detects and terminates ransomware in real time, enhancing resilience against ransomware-initiated termination attempts. RPTK requires no kernel modifications, no internet connection, and no additional backup storage, ensuring broad compatibility and deployment simplicity. Empirical evaluation against 50 representative samples from the most prevalent crypto-ransomware families yields a 100% detection accuracy rate and an architecturally guaranteed zero false-positive rate. By camouflaging critical data assets as operating system files, the framework successfully prevents ransomware from targeting user data. As a result, ransomware activity during testing was restricted to a single incident, encrypting only three files from the 12,288-file corpus before the process was terminated by the monitoring layer. Furthermore, even when evaluated within a resource-constrained testing environment, system overhead remains negligible at 0.9% CPU utilization and 48 MB memory consumption, confirming its operational viability for resource-limited endpoints and enterprise deployment. Ultimately, these findings demonstrate that the RPTK framework effectively prevents both known and novel zero-day crypto-ransomware strains from compromising user data.</p>

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A proactive camouflage-based approach to prevent crypto-ransomware: the ransomware prevention Toolkit (RPTK)

  • 期刊论文

  • 出版模式：

    开放获取

  • 发表日期：

    2026年8月1日

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  • Hesham Alshaikh,
  • Hesham Hefny,
  • Nagy Ramadan

摘要

Crypto ransomware poses an escalating threat to individuals and organizations, yet existing defenses remain fundamentally reactive. Anti-ransomware tools, such as CryptoDrop, R-Locker, CryptoStopper, and Cybereason RansomFree, are constrained by reliance on user intervention, vulnerability to slow-encryption and obfuscation evasion techniques, and the risk of volatile memory loss through forced system shutdowns. The growing adoption of double-extortion tactics, wherein ransomware operators both encrypt victim data and threaten public disclosure of exfiltrated information, further exposes critical gaps in current defenses. This paper introduces the Ransomware Prevention Toolkit (RPTK), a proactive hybrid solution that addresses these limitations by turning ransomware own behavioral tendencies against it. RPTK’s core novelty lies in its camouflage mechanism, which disguises critical files as system files through metadata alterations, signature modifications, and extension changes, exploiting the well-documented ransomware convention of sparing system files to maintain host operability. This prevents encryption and mitigates data exfiltration risk. A complementary monitoring service, disguised as a legitimate system process, autonomously detects and terminates ransomware in real time, enhancing resilience against ransomware-initiated termination attempts. RPTK requires no kernel modifications, no internet connection, and no additional backup storage, ensuring broad compatibility and deployment simplicity. Empirical evaluation against 50 representative samples from the most prevalent crypto-ransomware families yields a 100% detection accuracy rate and an architecturally guaranteed zero false-positive rate. By camouflaging critical data assets as operating system files, the framework successfully prevents ransomware from targeting user data. As a result, ransomware activity during testing was restricted to a single incident, encrypting only three files from the 12,288-file corpus before the process was terminated by the monitoring layer. Furthermore, even when evaluated within a resource-constrained testing environment, system overhead remains negligible at 0.9% CPU utilization and 48 MB memory consumption, confirming its operational viability for resource-limited endpoints and enterprise deployment. Ultimately, these findings demonstrate that the RPTK framework effectively prevents both known and novel zero-day crypto-ransomware strains from compromising user data.