More than 30 new partners from the public and private sector are joining the No More Ransom project; bringing with them more decryption tools, offering new support to victims of ransomware.
No More Ransom was launched in July 2016 by the Dutch National Police, Europol, Intel Security and Kaspersky Lab, aiming at more cooperation between law enforcement and the private sector against ransomware. On the project’s web portal, you can find details on what ransomware is, how it works and, most importantly, how to protect yourself and unlock files for free using one of the decryption tools.
As organisers say, ransomware is a global epidemic. To better reflect this, the online portal is now available not only in English, but in Dutch, Russian, French, Italian and Portuguese, with more languages to be added soon.
Bitdefender, Emsisoft, Check Point and Trend Micro join the project as new associate partners. As a result, new decryption tools have been added to nomoreransom.org, joining the eight tools already available free of charge to victims. Since launch, nearly 6000 people successfully decrypted their files without having to pay the criminals.
New supporting partners are: AnubisNetworks, AON, Armor, Association for Preventing and Countering Frauds (APCF), BH Consulting, CECyF (Centre Expert contre la Cybercriminalité Français), Cyberlaws.NET, Cylance Inc., DATTO, Inc., ESET, FS-ISAC (Financial Services – Information Sharing & Analysis Center), G-DATA Software AG, Heimdal Security, s21Sec, Smartfense, SWITCH, Ukrainian Interbank Payment Systems Member Association (EMA), CERT-EU (Computer Emergency Response Team for European Union institutions, agencies and bodies), IRISS CERT (Irish Reporting and Information Security Service), CIRCL.LU (Computer Incident Response Center Luxembourg), and SI-CERT (Slovenian Computer Emergency Response Team).
The Austrian, Croatian, Danish, Finnish, Maltese, Romanian, Singaporean and Slovenian police services also join as supporting partners, which brings the total number of countries involved to 22.
Jornt van der Wiel, Security Researcher at the Global Research and Analysis Team at Kaspersky Lab says: “Nobody is safe from ransomware. Our data shows that, over the last year, attacks on businesses increased three-fold, which represents a change from an attack every two minutes to one every 40 seconds. For individuals, the rate of increase went from every 20 seconds to every 10 seconds. This was matched by a surge in new types of ransomware. Too many people still believed they had no alternative but to pay up, even though many that paid the ransom never got their files back – including one in five businesses. This project provides an alternative – to unlock your files without paying the ransom.”
More prevention tips at www.nomoreransom.org.
