  Nowadays ransomware has become a new profitable form of attack. This type of
malware acts as a form of extortion which encrypts the files in a victim's
computer and forces the victim to pay the ransom to have the data recovered.
Even companies and tech savvy people must use extensive resources to maintain
backups for recovery or else they will lose valuable data, not mentioning
average users. Unfortunately, not any recovery tool can effectively defend
various types of ransomware. To address this challenge, we propose a novel
ransomware defense mechanism that can be easily deployed in modern Windows
system to recover the data and mitigate a ransomware attack. The uniqueness of
our approach is to fight the virus like a virus. We leverage Alternative Data
Streams which are sometimes used by malicious applications, to develop a data
protection method that misleads the ransomware to attack only file 'shells'
instead of the actual file content. We evaluated different file encrypting
ransomware and demonstrate usability, efficiency and effectiveness of our
approach.
