[Posted on behalf of Dinesh Kumar Aggarwal Founder | CISO | Architect | Cyber Security Practitioner | Information Security Blogger & Speaker]
We are in the beginning of Year 2017 and 2016 has been a year of ransomware attacks. This is expected to grow further in 2017 and beyond. There are concrete strategies and commercial tools available that you can use to protect yourself against these attacks. I will talk about these strategies and tools some other time. The purpose of this note is to share free tools to protect against ransomware attacks and options to recover in case you are already hit ( again using free tools).
Protection using free tools
RansomFree is a free tool and it claims to protect against 99% of ransomware strains, including never-before-seen types. This is a good option to use for windows systems. The tool works by identifying the typical pattern of behavior, knowing how and where ransomware will start encrypting files. This enables the tool to stops the encryption attempts targeting local disks, as well as detecting and stopping encryption over shared network drives. This is one of the best freely available option. RansomFree gets installed in 15-20 secs flat. You can download the tool from below link.
https://goo.gl/IrrPFC
Don't worry if you are a Mac OS X users :-) There is another free tool called RansomWhere which is for Mac users and can be downloaded from the below url. This tool is developed by a former NSA staffer and is targeted towards detecting and blocking generic ransomwares.
https://goo.gl/N50DTG
Recovery options
What are your options if you are already hit by the ransomware ? Pay up or else...
You don't have to always pay. There are free decryptor tools available. The best bet here is the global No More Ransom (NMR) project. This project was launched in 2016 by the Dutch National Police, Europol and cybersecurity vendors. This is the best example of cooperation between law enforcement agencies and the private sector to fight ransomware together. Enforcement agencies from 26 countries across Europe, as well as The European Commission and cybersecurity specialist companies are part of this project. This is one of the biggest force created anywhere across the globe to fight ransomware attacks. As on date, there are more than 20 decryptor tools available which you can use to recover from ransomware attacks.
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