  Ransomware is a significant global threat, with easy deployment due to the
prevalent ransomware-as-a-service model. Machine learning algorithms
incorporating the use of opcode characteristics and Support Vector Machine have
been demonstrated to be a successful method for general malware detection. This
research focuses on crypto-ransomware and uses static analysis of malicious and
benign Portable Executable files to extract 443 opcodes across all samples,
representing them as density histograms within the dataset. Using the SMO
classifier and PUK kernel in the WEKA machine learning toolset it demonstrates
that this methodology can achieve 100% precision when differentiating between
ransomware and goodware, and 96.5% when differentiating between 5
cryptoransomware families and goodware. Moreover, 8 different attribute
selection methods are evaluated to achieve significant feature reduction. Using
the CorrelationAttributeEval method close to 100% precision can be maintained
with a feature reduction of 59.5%. The CFSSubset filter achieves the highest
feature reduction of 97.7% however with a slightly lower precision at 94.2%.
