‘No More Ransom’, an initiative taken up by the Netherlands Police Department in association with the Europol’s Cybercrime Center, Kaspersky and McAfee is reported to have helped over 4 million ransomware victims to retrieve their encrypted files for free.
According to Tech resource ZDNet, this free initiative that also has an online presence from past 4 years is said to have prevented victims from paying $632 million to cyber criminals as their locked up files could be freely decrypted.
Launched in 2016, the No More Ransom website is said to have offered a free decryption tool to visitors from 188 countries with 12% of them saved by Bitdefender’s GandCrab Ransomware Decryption.
Till date, Europol estimates to have released decryption tools to over 140 ransomware families- out of which Emsioft is reported to have offered decryption tools to 45 ransomware families, Kaspersky to 32 file encrypting malware families and Trend Micro providing two tools to decrypt 27 ransomware families.
Online victims who visited the website were mostly from South Korea, India, Brazil, US and Russia says the website that is available now in over 36 languages and accessible from over 188 countries across the world.
As we know that prevention is better than cure, Europol recommends the same and is urging companies to install threat monitoring solutions in place, have backup data loaded onto servers and avoid falling prey to phishing attacks by creating an awareness among employees.
