Virtual canary files to mitigate ransomware attacks

Abstract

Provided is a computer agent and method to detect and prevent ransomware attacks early without losing customer data, without polluting the customer's file system or consuming any space on a storage device. The computer agent installs a kernel mode layered file system driver which is attached to encryption level group of a filter manager. With this layered file system filter driver design, it creates virtual canary files in directories which appear like normal files to any user or application though these files will not reside on disk. These virtual canary files are spread as baits across the file system to detect and prevent any malicious attack from any process or application. So that the Virtual Canary Files do not consume a large amount of memory, internal structures representing Virtual Canary Files are placed in virtual memory, but actual contents of the Virtual Canary Files do not reside in virtual memory. Other embodiments disclosed.