A group of researchers presented a new tech that can be installed on Solid State Drives (SSD)s to keep a check on ransomware spread. Presenting their find at the IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems in 2018, a team of researchers refined their invention even further that led to the innovation of a firmware that blocks ransomware from encrypting data on a computer network.
All these days, we have seen some antivirus software providers offer tech that can fight ransomware. But now, the researchers have stopped the software from using code embedded in the hardware in an automated way.
In simple words, the newly developed technology dubbed SSD-Inside++ stops the ransomware code from spreading its characteristics by rewriting a new code before the file encrypting malware can encode user data.
Still, not all is well in this invention, as it comes with an expense.
Security analysts say that the read and write functions for processing the firmware need to be done at a top speed. And so the storage medium that is being used must offer the tech with minimum latency delays, which can only be gained by using SSDs.
Meaning, the highly expensive SSD acts as a hardware protection and stands in between the malware and the network to prevent ransomware attacks besides perfect & fastest data recovery.
The good news is that the researchers tested the firmware and found that it has the potential to block 100% of malware attacks. And what’s amazing is that the software can recover data within ten seconds and determine the flaw that allowed the threat actors to sneak in.
There is a lot to be researched on this aspect, as the system needs to have regular updates to the firmware.
