Altcoin News: PayPal Received a Patent for the Development of Protection Against Crypto-Extortionists

April 19, 2019, by Marko Vidrih on ALTCOIN MAGAZINE

PayPal online payment system has received a patent for the development of a methodology that can detect cryptocurrency extortionists and mitigate the consequences of such attacks.

The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) approved a patent application filed in September 2016 that describes how using system data caches can help detect extinguishers of cryptocurrency and prevent blocking of victims’ files.

The ransomware program can encrypt the contents of a hard disk or other network files and make it inaccessible to users, and they will not be able to access their data without decryption keys.

PayPal seeks to prevent such a situation by using a method that detects the first copy of the original content that was loaded into the computer system cache, storing the second copy of this file in the cache, and comparing the two to determine whether the modified content represents the encrypted version of the original. It then prevents the original content from being deleted if the modified content was encrypted.

“By detecting that ransomware is operating on a computer (e.g. by correlating between the original data and content in different cache layers), the negative effects of the ransomware may be mitigated or avoided,” the patent application says.

The developers are convinced that even installing a backup system will not help to avoid data loss since files encrypted using ransomware programs can be automatically archived by overwriting the originals.

According to PayPal, detecting ransomware operations at an early stage can help reduce the damage done to victims. Earlier, the company applied for a new method of accelerating cryptocurrency transactions.

Author: Marko Vidrih