Europol has declared war on ransomware with the launch today of its ‘no more ransom’ initiative. Built around a new online portal (www.nomoreransom.org) and supported by the Dutch National Police, Kaspersky Lab and Intel Security (McAfee), the purpose is to help protect users from ransomware, to help infected victims recover their data, and to gather information for law enforcement agencies.
Europol stresses that prevention is better — and more effective — than cure. The number of victims is growing dramatically, while the number of decryption tools remains low. Kaspersky says the number of users attacked by crypto-ransomware rose by 5.5 times, from 131,000 in 2014-2015 to 718,000 in 2015-2016. The portal currently contains four decryption tools for different malware versions.
