“For a few years now ransomware has become a dominant concern for European Union law enforcement”, Wil van Gemert, Europol’s deputy director operations, said in a statement. Numerous a large number of PCs are thought to be tainted by the ransomware. “This is a joint obligation of the police, the equity office, Europol, and ICT organizations, and requires a joint exertion”, said Wilbert Paulissen, chief of the national criminal examination division of the National Police of the Netherlands.
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Efforts to tackle the scourge of ransomware have been boosted by a new initiative created to educate people about the threat and offer keys that can unlock devices without having to pay the fraudsters.
Since its appearance in 2014, Intel Security and Kaspersky Lab have managed to prevent over 27,000 attack attempts.
“Initiatives like the No More Ransom project shows that linking expertise and joining forces is the way to go in the successful fight against cybercrime”, van Gemert said. In May, ESET claimed that it had contacted TeslaCrypt’s authors after spotting a message announcing they were closing their “project” and offered a decryption key.
To inform people about the dangers of ransomware and aid victims in recovering their data without having to fork over money to criminals, the agency and the companies launched an online portal called “No More Ransom”.
The portal provides information on what ransomware is and how to protect against it. The group released a tool containing over 160,000 decryption keys, however these appear to be mostly for computers infected with variants of the Shade family of ransomware.
The US was the most heavily targeted country, being hit by 31 percent of attacks, with the United Kingdom coming in 6th place in terms of the number of attacks. “We want [NoMoreRansom.org] to become a powerful help center for anyone who becomes a victim of ransomware, be it the development and distribution of the new decryption tools or by starting a criminal investigation”, van der Wiel said. Reporting ransomware to law enforcement is important to help authorities get an overall clearer picture and a greater capacity to mitigate the threat.
The advice is, in general, not to pay the ransom if you do fall victim to hackers (that’s why you’ll need those backups), but some organisations have paid the demands, including the University of Calgary, which paid $20,000 to restore access to its systems and data following an attack. “It is sometimes possible to help infected users to regain access to their encrypted files or locked systems, without having to pay”.
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In the United States, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has issued guidance to people about ransomware, advising victims not to pay the ransoms. By paying you are basically investing in the cybercrime’s business and making the attackers stronger and greedier.
