Digital payments giant PayPal has just announced its award for a cybersecurity patent to tackle crypto ransomware.

According to the document published by U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) on April 16, the patent entitled “Techniques for ransomware detection and mitigation” is designed to prevent users from a type of crypto malware that could block the owners from accessing their files.

The document also pointed out that ransomware can encrypt the contents of networked files then delete the owner’s original data. These attacks would prevent users from access to the original files and would ask for ransom in cryptocurrency to decrypt the contents.

For this reason, PayPal now seeks to prevent the crypto ransomware by finding a first copy of original content that was originated from the computer system, then saving that files as a second copy to compare the two data if an encrypted version occured. By doing this, the technique can determine the ransomware, mitigate its effects and prevent the original data from being deleted.

Last year, PayPal also filed a patent application to improve the speed of crypto payments. The concept is to shorten waiting times between merchant and consumer transactions.

Cyber security is a crucial need in this digital age. Recently, IBM also added two of its blockchain patents to ensure security and database management.