Ransomware: a comprehensive study of the exponentially increasing cybersecurity threat

Ransomware threats and incidents have exponentially increased causing both financial and reputational losses to organizations of all sizes and sectors. Ransomware attacks became the talk of the news when the world was hit by COVID 19 pandemic and people shifted to remote work in large numbers (Brynjolfsson et al., 2020, p. 13-14). Cybercriminals and threat groups are using various types of social engineering techniques such as email phishing, smishing, spear phishing attacks to spread ransomware infections in systems and networks. To protect organizations, users, and IT infrastructures it is important to understand how ransomware works, and how various threat actors use it to exfiltrate confidential data and information. Hence a critical approach toward ransomware infection and its mitigation by using different techniques is discussed and analyzed in this research paper concerning other scholarly articles and papers.