Cyber attacks are increasingly becoming prevalent and causing significant
damage to individuals, businesses and even countries. In particular, ransomware
attacks have grown significantly over the last decade. We do the first study on
mining insights about ransomware attacks by analyzing query logs from Bing web
search engine. We first extract ransomware related queries and then build a
machine learning model to identify queries where users are seeking support for
ransomware attacks. We show that user search behavior and characteristics are
correlated with ransomware attacks. We also analyse trends in the temporal and
geographical space and validate our findings against publicly available
information. Lastly, we do a case study on 'Nemty', a popular ransomware, to
show that it is possible to derive accurate insights about cyber attacks by
query log analysis.Comment: To appear in the proceedings of SIGIR 202