The No More Ransom Project, which we joined in April as an associate partner, is celebrating its one year anniversary today. The initiative was launched by the Dutch National Police, Europol, McAfee and Kaspersky Lab and today there have more than 100 partners.

Mass ransomware attacks like WannaCry and Petna show that ransomware is definitely not going anywhere anytime soon. During the time of the WannaCry outbreak, 150,000 people visited the No More Ransom website.  At Avast, we detected 1,750,000 WannaCry attacks in 159 countries, 20,000 Petna attacks in 32 countries. Apart from these massive outbreaks, we also protected millions of our users from traditional ransomware attacks.

No More Ransom carries 54 decryption tools, provided by 9 partners, covering 104 families of ransomware.  As an associate partner, Avast has contributed 9 of its 20 decryption tools to the project. Our decryption tools were downloaded more than 130,000 times.

The No More Ransom platform is now available in 26 languages, with the most recent language additions are Bulgarian, Chinese, Czech, Greek, Hungarian, Indonesian, Malay, Norwegian, Romanian, Swedish, Tamil and Thai.

We look forward to continuing our work with No More Ransom and seeing their project grow.

You can find Avast’s 20 free tools on our free ransomware decryption tools page. Additionally, you can find further tools on the No More Ransom Project.

Tips on how to avoid ransomware

• Install antivirus on all devices possible, including on your smartphone. Antivirus will block ransomware, should you encounter it.
• Updating all of your software whenever a new version becomes available can help prevent ransomware from exploiting a software vulnerability to infect your device.
• Being cautious can also greatly help avoid ransomware. You should stay away from shady websites, be careful what you download, and not open any links or attachments sent to you from a suspicious or unknown sender. Many people don’t think an ordinary Word or Excel document can lead to something malicious downloaded, which is why cybercriminals like using them for their attacks. Malicious attachments, sent in the form of a Word or Excel document, often request macros to be enabled, which allows the document to download malware, including ransomware, from the internet.
• While it cannot help you avoid ransomware, backing up your data on a regular basis will help avoid data loss, in case you fall victim to ransomware. If you regularly backup your data, while offline, to an external hard drive that is not connected to the internet, you greatly lower the risk of anyone touching your data through the internet.