Can ML Hardware Really Detect Ransomware? Colonial Pipeline Says Yes

The recent ransomware attack on Colonial Pipeline is another painful reminder of how vulnerable we are to such attacks and difficult it is to defend our infrastructures against them. RaaS (Ransomware as a service) is a thriving industry in many dark corners of the world, and protecting against it at the intelligent edge is particularly difficult. Challenges include day zero detection with no previous example or known signature, low latency response time, and high detection throughput rate needed to handle the ever-increasing online transactions at the intelligent edge. Additional challenges included limited compute and power resources and hardware architecture flexible enough to change when threat conditions change. Center for Advanced Electronics through Machine Learning (CAEML) researchers have been investigating machine learning hardware solutions that can accelerate ransomware detection at the intelligent edge.