"CSL Researchers Add ‘Time-Travel’ Feature to Solid State Drives to Fight Ransomware Attacks"
In a paper, titled Project Almanac: A Time-Traveling Solid State Drive, researchers from the Coordinated Science Laboratory at the University of Illinois describe a tool that can allow victims to save their files in the event that they experience a ransomware attack, without having to succumb to the demands for ransom payments. The tool discussed in the paper can be used to enable solid-state drives, which are used in most computers as a component of the storage system, to save old versions of files instead of get rid of them when the files are modified. Through the use of this tool, ransomware attacks can be prevented. This article continues to discuss how the tool can help thwart ransomware attacks, the trade-off associated with this tool, how this trade-off can be managed, and the expected advancement of the tool.