Free decryption tools provided by Bitdefender are now available, offering ransomware victims the possibility to decrypt their files without having to pay criminals to do so.

The decryption tools developed by Bitdefender have been added to nomoreransom.org, an online portal available in English, Dutch, French, Italian, Portuguese and Russian.

“With estimates of ransomware induced financial losses nearing the billion dollar mark by the end of 2016, traditional security mechanism and technologies have fallen short of a complete defense against this type of threat,” says Bitdefender’s Chief Security Strategist, Catalin Cosoi.

According to a Bitdefender study carried out in the United States last year, ransomware comes second among the top concerns of CIOs of medium and large companies – 13.7 percent of the interviewed companies perceive ransomware as a hard-to-tackle threat. Simultaneously, half of individual victims are willing to pay up to $500 to recover encrypted data.

The file-encrypting malware has not only become a growing threat for PCs, but also for devices running Android.

Cybercriminals have been deploying as many ransomware samples as possible, using diverse attack vectors, to make sure they infect a large pool of victims. While drive-by downloads may have infected some, infected attachments and fake installers seem to have also been deployed for ransomware infection.

On www.nomoreransom.org, users can also find information on what ransomware is and how to protect themselves.

No More Ransom was launched in July 2016 by the Dutch National Police, and Europol, among others, introducing a new level of cooperation between law enforcement and the private sector to fight ransomware together.

Here are a few steps that could help users stay safe from ransomware:

• Use a known, award-winning security suite

• Patch or update your software to avoid known vulnerabilities from being exploited and used to infect your system

• Back up your data

• Enable the “Show hidden file extension” option. This will help identify suspicious files that have been named “.ZIP.EXE” and prevent their execution

Companies, meanwhile, are strongly encouraged to:

• Use an endpoint security solution

• Patch or update all endpoint software and webservers

• Deploy a backup solution

• Disable files from running in locations such as “AppData/LocalAppData” and deploy policies that restrict users from executing malware

• Limit users from accessing mapped network drives

• Protect email servers with content filtering solutions

• Educate employees on identifying spear-phishing emails and other social engineering techniques.

More prevention tips and information are available on www.nomoreransom.org