Ransomware attacks increased significantly in recent years. The European police authority Europol provides 136 free tools for this purpose, which have already helped 1.5 million victims. This could save billions in ransom demands.
Europol: No More Ransom initiative a complete success
Europol’s No More Ransom initiative, launched six years ago, has been a resounding success. Just in time for the program’s sixth birthday, the European police agency released some thrilling statistics on the portal, which was launched by Europol, the Dutch police and several IT security companies.
At the current time, the initiative includes 136 free tools for 165 ransomware variants. More than 188 partners from the public and private sectors are already participating, regularly delivering new decryption tools to tackle the latest offshoots of the malware.
To date, the program has helped over 1.5 million victims of ransomware attacks. In the process, the affected devices were decrypted without having to pay a ransom to the criminals, he said.
As reported by Motherboard magazine, citing information from a Europol press conference, the savings from unpaid ransoms are in the billions. There is talk of around 1.5 billion euros.
Europol says fight to ransomware
Ransomware attacks have been a problem for many years. And are recently becoming more and more, while the demands of the attackers also continue to rise. For example, nearly 56 GB of data was stolen from AMD in January 2022, however the ransomware attack was only recently made public.
Previously, also QNAP NAS devices were affected by an attack from the group “Deadbolt”, while it already hit hardware manufacturer Gigabyte last year.
Here, Europol has already been offering its help for six years and provides various free tools to regain possession of stolen data or to prevent attacks. The tools have already been downloaded more than 10 million times worldwide, according to statistics.
They do not provide a detailed breakdown of the 1.5 billion euros in savings over the six years of existence. However, Allan Liska, a security researcher at Recorded Future, believes the potential would be much greater, as many companies are afraid to contact law enforcement after a ransomware attack.
Often out of “misguided fear that law enforcement would only make matters worse,” Liska said. But Europol’s data shows that just the opposite is true.
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