Eliminating Ransomware Attacks with Program Access Control (PAC)

In the wake of ransomware reaching epidemic proportions and the current anti-ransomware products’ inability to stop its march, there is a great deal of urgency in creating effective countermeasures. Our proposal is to design and subsequently develop a technology called Program Access Control (PAC), that can positively protect data on both consumer and enterprise systems. If successfully deployed, PAC is expected to make the current crop of ransomware and their future mutations useless. It can automatically block ransomware attempts even under severe conditions such as elevated file access privileges. As a never-before tried mechanism, it provides ransomware protection EVEN when the malware is inadvertently executed on the client or server system. The technology is designed to strangle ransomware actions (i.e., data encryption) at the very last stage of the Cyber Kill Chain, leaving no maneuvering space for attackers. This makes it impossible to evade PAC’s defense. The technology achieves this GUARANTEED blocking of ransomware attacks by taking an approach completely different from application whitelisting, which is not a proclaimed security solution. While whitelisting allows only pre-listed applications to run on a system, our solution doesn’t restrict ANY applications from running and thus compensates for user mistakes.