Abstract
Malware variants exhibit polymorphic attacks due to the tremendous growth of the present technologies. For instance, ransomware, an astonishingly growing set of monetary-gain threats in the recent years, is peculiarized as one of the most treacherous cyberthreats against innocent individuals and businesses by locking their devices and/or encrypting their files. Many proposed attempts have been introduced by cybersecurity researchers aiming at mitigating the epidemic of the ransomware attacks. However, this type of malware is kept refined by utilizing new evasion techniques, such as sophisticated codes, dynamic payloads, and anti-emulation techniques, in order to survive against detection systems. This paper introduces RanDetector, a new automated and lightweight system for detecting ransomware applications in Android platform based on their behavior. In particular, this detection system investigates the appearance of some information that is related to ransomware operations in an inspected application before integrating some supervised machine learning models to classify the application. RanDetector is evaluated and tested on a dataset of more 450 applications, including benign and ransomware. Hence, RanDetector has successfully achieved more that 97.62% detection rate with nearly zero false positive.