Kaspersky Lab Defeats Ransomware Kidnappers With Software Giveaway

© AFP 2023 / ALEXEY SAZONOVEmployees of anti-virus program development Kaspersky Lab work at their company's offices in Moscow, on March 10, 2011
Employees of anti-virus program development Kaspersky Lab work at their company's offices in Moscow, on March 10, 2011 - Sputnik International
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A collaboration of between European police and major cybersecurity firms has come up with free weapons to help users fight ransomware, a new kind of computer virus.

Russia's Kaspersky Lab has teamed up with Intel Security, Europol and Dutch police to create a new product to fight ransomware, a type of malware that locks a user's computer or encrypts their files. 

​Once the computer has been hijacked by ransomware, cyber-criminals demand a ransom to give data back, and like ordinary kidnappers, there is no guarantee they will be true to their word.

A Kaspersky representative told Radio Sputnik that their collaboration has come up with free software to help victims of ransomware.

"This is a very practical project, working together with law enforcement agencies and industry partners to share information about ransomware, and especially about ransomware threats," he said.

"In the end, we are able to find the command and control servers which hold the keys from the victims (of ransomware). Next, the police tries to seize the server with all the keys, they share it with us, and we make decryption tools so that people can decrypt their files for free," he explained.

Employees of anti-virus program development Kaspersky Lab work at their company's offices in Moscow, on March 10, 2011 - Sputnik International
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Kaspersky has shared four free decryption tools on its website to help users fight ransomware, and the company is hard at work making more.

"All the tools are free of charge, that's the whole idea – we don't charge users anything. We want to pull the angle out of ransomware, we don't want it to be successful anymore and that's why we're going after the servers with the keys so we can give users the possibility to decrypt their file for free."

The new initiative is called "No More Ransom," and so far it contains more than 160,000 keys which will help victims to retrieve their data.

According to Kaspersky, the number of victims of ransomware is growing at an alarming rate: in 2014-2015 there were 131,000, which rose to 718,000 in 2015-2016.

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