🛡️ RansomWatch — AI-Based Ransomware Behavior Detection

Ransomware attacks can quickly encrypt files, terminate processes, and cause serious damage before a user realizes what is happening.

So I started building RansomWatch, a cybersecurity project focused on detecting ransomware-like behavior at the system level rather than simply looking for known ransomware names or signatures.

🔍 What does RansomWatch do?

RansomWatch monitors system activity and looks for suspicious behavior such as:

• Rapid file modifications
• Suspicious file operations
• Unusual process activity
• Ransomware-like behavioral patterns
• Multiple suspicious events happening together

The collected activity is converted into features and passed to a machine-learning detection system.

⚙️ How it works

Safe Attack Simulator
        ↓
File & Process Monitor
        ↓
Feature Extraction
        ↓
ML Detection
        ↓
Risk Scoring
        ↓
Security Alert

The project also includes an evidence layer for storing incidents and a RAG-based knowledge system that can provide cybersecurity context for detected events.

The planned architecture also connects the detection system with an API, AI analysis, and a web dashboard for investigation and visualization.

🧪 Safe ransomware simulation

For development and testing, I'm using an attack simulator that generates ransomware-like behavior in a controlled test environment instead of using real ransomware.

This makes it possible to test the detection pipeline without intentionally damaging real files.

🧠 Technologies

The project combines:

• Python
• Machine Learning
• File & Process Monitoring
• Random Forest
• Risk Scoring
• SQLite
• RAG
• Generative AI
• REST API
• Web Dashboard

🚧 Current focus

I'm building the project step by step, starting with the actual detection pipeline:

Simulator → Monitor → Features → ML → Risk → Alert

Once that foundation works reliably, I'll integrate the RAG, AI analysis, API, and dashboard components.

This project is helping me learn how cybersecurity, system monitoring, machine learning, and AI can work together for threat detection.

More updates coming as I build it. 🚀

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