According to a document from the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) published on April 16, PayPal, the giant in the digital payment industry has won a cybersecurity patent to protect users from crypto ransomware.
Nowadays, crypto ransomware attacks are rampant and have become increasingly frequent with devastating effects. This form of malware can take over user’s computer, locks up their files and then demands a ransom before the files can be accessed again – often to be paid in cryptocurrency.
PayPal, therefore, is looking to prevent such a situation with a method involving detecting a first copy of original content that has been loaded into a cache of a computer system, retaining in the cache a second copy of that file and comparing the two to determine if the altered content represents an encrypted version of the original content. It then prevents the original content from being deleted if the altered content has been encrypted.
PayPal intends to improve the detection of ransomware and prevent it from locking up users’ access to their files. Last year, PayPal also filed another USPTO patent to increase the speed of crypto payments by using secondary private keys. It narrows the amount of time it takes for payments to go through between consumer and merchant.
Recently, global tech giant IBM filed another blockchain patent to manage data and interactions for self-driving vehicles.
