  With the recent growth in the number of malicious activities on the internet,
cybersecurity research has seen a boost in the past few years. However, as
certain variants of malware can provide highly lucrative opportunities for bad
actors, significant resources are dedicated to innovations and improvements by
vast criminal organisations. Among these forms of malware, ransomware has
experienced a significant recent rise as it offers the perpetrators great
financial incentive. Ransomware variants operate by removing system access from
the user by either locking the system or encrypting some or all of the data,
and subsequently demanding payment or ransom in exchange for returning system
access or providing a decryption key to the victim. Due to the ubiquity of
sensitive data in many aspects of modern life, many victims of such attacks, be
they an individual home user or operators of a business, are forced to pay the
ransom to regain access to their data, which in many cases does not happen as
renormalisation of system operations is never guaranteed. As the problem of
ransomware does not seem to be subsiding, it is very important to investigate
the underlying forces driving and facilitating such attacks in order to create
preventative measures. As such, in this paper, we discuss and provide further
insight into variants of ransomware and their victims in order to understand
how and why they have been targeted and what can be done to prevent or mitigate
the effects of such attacks.
