ALEXANDRIA, Va., June 16 -- United States Patent no. 12,306,939, issued on May 20, was assigned to International Business Machines Corp. (Armonk, N.Y.).
"Hidden security flags for ransomware attack protection" was invented by Andrew C. M. Hicks (Highland, N.Y.) and John S. Werner (Dutchess, N.Y.).
According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A method and system for detecting and stopping a ransomware attack. Prior to any attack hidden security flags are inserted into data that is stored. The data can be unencrypted either because the user does not intend to encrypt the data, the data has yet to be encrypted as part of a normal encryption process or is subject to additional encryption. A request is received t...