Ransomware has evolved into a pervasive and extremely disruptive cybersecurity threat, causing substantial operational and financial damage to individuals and businesses. This article explores the critical domain of Ransomware detection and employs Machine Learning (ML) classifiers, particularly Decision Tree (DT), for Ransomware detection. The article also delves into the usefulness of DT in identifying Ransomware attacks, leveraging the innate ability of DT to recognize complex patterns within datasets. Instead of merely introducing DT as a detection method, we adopt a comprehensive approach, emphasizing the importance of fine-tuning DT hyperparameters. The optimization of these parameters is essential for maximizing the DT capability to identify Ransomware threats accurately. The obfuscated-MalMem2022 dataset, which is well-known for its extensive and challenging Ransomware-related data, was utilized to evaluate the effectiveness of DT in detecting Ransomware. The implementation uses the versatile Python programming language, renowned for its efficiency and adaptability in data analysis and ML tasks. Notably, the DT classifier consistently outperforms other classifiers in Ransomware detection, including K-Nearest Neighbors, Gradient Boosting Tree, Naive Bayes, and Linear Support Vector Classifier. For instance, the DT demonstrated exceptional effectiveness in distinguishing between Ransomware and benign data, as evidenced by its remarkable accuracy of 99.97%.

The security and integrity of computer systems and networks highly depend on malware detection. In the realm of malware detection, the K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN) algorithm is a well-liked and successful machine learning algorithm. However, the choice of an acceptable distance metric parameter has a significant impact on the KNN algorithm's performance. This study tries to improve malware detection by adjusting the KNN algorithm's distance metric parameter. The distance metric greatly influences the similarity or dissimilarity between instances in the feature space. The KNN algorithm for malware detection can be more accurate and effective by carefully choosing or modifying the distance metric. This paper analyzes multiple distance metrics, including Minkowski distance, Manhattan distance, and Euclidean distance. These metrics account for the traits of malware samples while capturing various aspects of similarity. The effectiveness of the KNN algorithm is evaluated using the MalMem-2022 malware dataset, and the results are broken down into these three-distance metrics. The experimental findings show that, among the three distance metric parameters, the Euclidean and Minkowski distance metric parameters considerably produced the best outcomes with binary classification. While with multiclass classification, the KNN algorithm has achieved the highest outcomes using Manhattan distance.