Hierarchical Sparse Neural Networks for Structure-Aware Ransomware Detection Under Distribution Shift
Behavioral ransomware detection often achieves high accuracy in standard evaluations; however, these results frequently fail to generalize under distribution shifts or when encountering previously unseen families. This study evaluates detection performance on the MLRan dataset (4,880 samples across 64 families) using four rigorous evaluation protocols: stratified, temporal, family-disjoint, and open-set. To ensure a strict separation of learned features, the family-disjoint and open-set splits were executed at the family level. We propose the Hierarchical Sparse Neural Network (HSNN), a […]