One year on. It is fair to say that the No More Ransom project not only exceeded our expectations, but simply blew these initial expectations out of the water. A collaboration between six partners (McAfee, EC3, Dutch Police, Kaspersky Lab, AWS and Barracuda) has now grown to include more than 100 partners across the public and private sector. We often hear people talk about Public-Private Partnerships, but here is a true example of that commitment in action.
Because of this commitment from all the partners, this initiative has resulted in the successful decryption of more than 28,000 computers. Let us put that into context, for zero cost, victims of ransomware who do not have to be customers of any security provider can get their data back for nothing. They don’t have to fill in a survey, enter their email address, provide their credit card details, in fact they don’t even have to worry about obfuscating their IP address. For the first time, there is another option. No longer are victims faced with the option of a) lose my data or b) pay criminals.
So thank you to all of our partners, thank you to those of you that tweeted, blogged about it. This site has been successful, in fact so successful that we even have ransomware named after us.
Of course, the Queen of England gets a boat named after her, we get ransomware! Well that’s okay, because it shows that as the tens of millions of dollars we have prevented going into the hands of criminals, they have taken notice.
We will not stop, in fact, we need more partners, more decryption tools, and more successes. The message of #DontPay seems to be working (as we witnessed with WannaCry and nPetya), and we will continue in our efforts to hurt the bottom line of criminals.
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