The No More Ransom initiative of Europol, security companies, and national police forces is five years old. In that time, 121 tools for defusing ransomware have been released and have been downloaded more than six million times.
Security company Emsisoft released the most tools: 59 for as many ransomware families. Kaspersky created five tools that can be used against 32 ransomware families. Trend Micro published two tools that work against 27 different types of ransomware. Europol publishes the figures in honor of the five-year anniversary of the project.
Decryption tools allow victims of ransomware to decrypt their files without paying criminals. According to the organizations, criminals have lost almost a billion euros as a result. No More Ransom also provides prevention advice and instructions on how to report cybercrime. The initiative’s website has been completely revamped .
The No More Ransom project was started in 2016 by the Team High Tech Crime of the Dutch police, the European Cybercrime Center of Europol, Kaspersky and McAfee. In addition to these four founders, the initiative now consists of 170 partners. Of these, 26 percent is a police force and 74 percent is a private company.