AMERSTERDAM–A new initiative has been launched aimed at helping PC users who have been victimized by ransomware.
Called “No More Ransom,” the effort is being launched by the National High Tech Crime Unit of the Netherlands' police, Europol's European Cybercrime Center, Kaspersky Lab and Intel Security. The organizations said they cooperated to create NoMoreRansom.org to offer a one-stop shop for battling ransomware infections.
The organizations also announced that they have successfully taken down the malicious infrastructure used by the gang behind the Shade ransomware, enabling it to develop and release a free decryption tool for 160,000 victims.
"When we've done takedowns in the past, remediation has always been the difficult part, because you've got to get people to download tools and so forth," says Raj Samani, Intel Security's CTO for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, in a released statement.
The No More Ransom site offers four decryption tools that decrypt a range of ransomware variants, including CoinVault, Cryptokluchen, Rannoh and TeslaCrypt. It also includes ShadeDecryptor, a new decryptor for Shade malware, which sometimes appends "breaking_bad" to the end of encrypted filenames.
According to the four organizations behind the new effort, the No More Ransom portal also allows ransomware victims to upload samples of encrypted files that the site will scan to see if the ransomware variant can be decrypted using available tools. The site also gives ransomware victims in Europe and the United States a way to report infections to authorities to help them to better trace and battle ransomware-using crooks.
The organizations behind the No More Ransoms portal say it's a noncommercial effort that other public or private organizations are welcome to join.
As CUToday.info reported here, ransomware is increasingly a threat to credit unions, as well.