'No More Ransom' Decryption Tools Prevent $108M In Ransomware Payments

An anonymous reader quotes ZDNet: On the three-year anniversary of the No More Ransom project, Europol announced today that users who downloaded and decrypted files using free tools made available through the No More Ransom portal have prevented ransomware gangs from making profits estimated at at least $108 million... However, an Emsisoft spokesperson told ZDNet that the $108 million estimate that Europol shared today is "actually a huge underestimate. They're based on the number of successful decryptions confirmed by telemetry -- in other words, when the tools phone home to confirm they've done their job," Emsisoft told ZDNet... Just the free decryption tools for the GandCrab ransomware alone offered on the No More Ransom website have prevented ransom payments of nearly $50 million alone, Europol said.

The project, which launched in July 2016, now hosts 82 tools that can be used to decrypt 109 different types of ransomware. Most of these have been created and shared by antivirus makers like Emsisoft, Avast, and Bitdefender, and others; national police agencies; CERTs; or online communities like Bleeping Computer. By far the most proficient member has been antivirus maker Emsisoft, which released 32 decryption tools for 32 different ransomware strains... All in all, Europol said that more than three million users visited the site and more than 200,000 users downloaded tools from the No More Ransom portal since its launch.
One Emisoft researcher said they were "pretty proud" of their decryptor for MegaLocker, "as not only did it help thousands of victims, but it really riled up the malware author."

Really riled up

[chuckugly]

Someone should get a gold star for the use of "riled up" in a sentence in the 21st century.

Re: Now all we need is SWASTIKAS

[cormandy]

How the fuck can this be up here for 12 hours? What the hell happened to /.???? Mods?

Re:

[chrism238]

Indeed, not a term we see everyday, these days.

But now the malware author won't both encrypting files, and may just start deleting them.

Re:

[jwhyche]

That would defeat the purpose of trying to ransom your files back to you. If they just deleted them then there would be no reason for anyone to pay you anything.

Re:

[Bert64]

You don't know there isn't a key until you've paid the ransom, by which time it is too late.

Re:

[ShanghaiBill]

You don't know there isn't a key until you've paid the ransom, by which time it is too late.

The word would get out.

Part of the reason that ransomware is so successful, is that the data-nappers have a solid reputation for keeping their promises. Once you pay, you get your data back.

Good customer service pays off.

Re:

[Kaenneth]

"Piracy is a customer service problem"

but really, this is what should be called 'piracy' (taking people's data away from them, so something is *actually* lost), not copyright infringement.

Re:

[dunkelfalke]

Only if it happens on a ship, though. Otherwise it is kidnapping.

Re:

[Applehu Akbar]

The word would get out.

Part of the reason that ransomware is so successful, is that the data-nappers have a solid reputation for keeping their promises. Once you pay, you get your data back.

Good customer service pays off.

Actually, only about half the victims who pay ransoms get their data back:
https://datarecovery.com/rd/ha... [datarecovery.com]

Re:

[ctilsie242]

So that makes their record light-years ahead of customer service in almost any other field?

Re:

[matt_hs]

More effective would be to keep a cache of keys and have a different key per file. Have the malware make a request to the C&C server for each key as it decrypts each file.

Or

[Billly Gates]

Competent System Administrators can use a new bleeding edge technology called Tape Backups

Re:

[gweihir]

Indeed. Or for a really cheap, home-user compatible alternative, USB drives. But incompetent "managers" do not hire competent sysadmins these days. It is all in the cloud anyways, right?

Re:

[Namarrgon]

Just so long as they don't leave said home-user USB backup drives permanently attached. Doesn't matter how regular your backup regime is if all your backup files get encrypted by the malware too. Offline is essential (and ideally rotated offsite as well).

Re:

[sd4f]

I worked at one place where this happened. I think for a lot of businesses, it seems overkill, but when your IT system is at the core of your business being able to conduct any business, then it makes absolute sense. I think for a lot of people though, the annoyance is that by design, it's a repetitive procedure which can't be automated.

Re:

[pnutjam]

I had a clueless business customer that got their data encrypted. I told them they had some sort of malware and recommended some remediation and backup work, but that wasn't in the budget.

Re:

[gweihir]

Of course. That was implied. Same as you do not leave your backup tapes in the drive.

Re:

[Gravis Zero]

Competent...

Let me stop you right there. We only have "cheap" and "fresh out of school" variety of employees. Who are these "competent" employees you speak of?

Re:

[Kaenneth]

Anyone with good technical skills gets promoted to middle management, where they lack people skills. (Peter Principle)

Re:Tape backups are worthless

[xonen]

You totally exaggerate the costs of tape backups, and if a company really has that much data, they won't blink an eye for a $300,000 purchase.

For what's wrong with the cloud - not everything because it does have it's uses but to summarize: the data is no longer yours, nor is your capability to preserve it. Storing any sensitive data at a 3rd party is the digital equivalent of selling your soul to Beelzebub.

Only if your data is not sensitive at all, the cloud is an option, and even then it would be pretty stupid to rely on your cloud provider as the only source of backups so you'd always want an in-house backup facility as well. Which could be as simple and cheap as a $100 Bluray writer.

Re:

[Ed Tice]

There are plenty of could providers who can (and will) protect data as well as you can do it yourself. If you are a smaller organization, the cloud providers may even do it *better*. I work for a fairly large company but we don't have the resources of a Google or an Amazon or even a Microsoft. And cloud security scales across all of the customers so the providers can invest more efficiently. For something like backups, the data can be encrypted (not ransomware encrypted, but where you control the keys)

Re:

[ctilsie242]

Tape does have an archival life. I have not seen a hard drive that is rated for archiving capabilities. At best, hard drives can be put in an array with some sort of fault tolerance (RAID, ZFS, etc.) with that pool checked every so often, but tape is arguably the best for long term life.

As part of an archive, tapes shouldn't sit around for 10-20 years. The data should be taken out and copied to newer media once in a while. I wish we had a tape backup standard (other than tar, or LTFS) where one can impo

Re:

[Ed Tice]

For backups that are designed to deal with the ransomeware threat, you don't need much archival life. You know right away that you are infected and can restore. That doesn't mean that you don't need it for a *complete* solution. But to mitigate ransomeware, just having a recent set of backups on any media will go a long way.

Re:

[AF_Cheddar_Head]

. You know right away that you are infected and can restore.

Actually you may not know right away, some variants of Ransom Ware invade your system and lay dormant for a while. You make a backup and now it's part of your backup. The ransomware kicks off, you wipe and restore, the Ransom Ware on you backup then kicks off. Lots of fun.

Re:

[BlackOverflow]

Blu-Ray is better. If stored correctly it should last longer and has no issue with magnetic erasure or corruption.

Re:

[Trogre]

Well I feel silly for paying less than $3000 for mine, and using purely FOSS to write to it.

Should I send it back?

Re:

[gTsiros]

how can you know the backups are clean?

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

You keep several generations of backups. I suppose they could leave a time bomb, but your odds of having a good backup are very high when it's done correctly.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Even if there is a time bomb, your executable state might not be clean enough for a restore-and-run, but at least you can recover databases, documents, emails, etc. That is the big reason organizations are paying ransoms. They aren't trying to avoid having to rebuild systems, they're doing it to recover data.

Re:

[ctilsie242]

As a best practice, it is wise to have a backup done to a WORM media tape pool, such as every quarter, and two backups, one before EOFY, and after EOFY. This way, you know you have usable data that can't be tampered with. Alternatively something like an Isilon with SmartLock or a NetApp with SnapLock can offer similar functionality, but tape is the best storage medium out there for archival life.

Re:

[grasshoppa]

Sometimes the cost of paying for ransomware is worth more than what was lost since the last backup.

Then the backup sets were poorly designed/configured, and you are not dealing with competent admins.

A competent admin will analyze the needs of the business and design solutions appropriately. If you ever get to the point where it's cheaper to "pay and hope" instead of restore from backups, then your system has failed you.

Re:

[AmiMoJo]

Tapes are okay if you have a decent budget for backups and are willing to put in the time and effort.

If you don't have the budget to manage all that (equipment, staff, time) then cloud is a better option. Ideally two different cloud storage systems. Offload the work of physically managing the storage media. It scales nicely and the data is geographically distributed.

Re:

[BarbaraHudson]

I'm fairly secure in the idea that law enforcement has him (Alexander Peter Kowalski) on their radar, but thanks for bringing it to my attention that maybe I should do my part to make the world a safer place. I will be in court asking for a protective order against a local perv - I can use APK as an example of the extra crap trans women have to worry about.

He's been going on about how he's been in business 10-12 years - how about a link to your state business registration APK?

I mean, how hard can it b

Is this legal???

[BitterOak]

This software must be in violation of the DMCA or something similar. At the very least, the author of the ransomware could sue the people offering these tools for tortuous interference.

Re:

[gweihir]

Excellent! I like it!

I call Bulshit --- they have not broken crypto

[aberglas]

If the ransomware people were clever enough to get their software onto a victim's machine they almost certainly were clever enough to use standard crypto algorithms. AES, RSA, etc. cannot be broken. Lots of very smart crypanalysts have tried.

Unless the ransomware people did something really stupid like leaving crypto keys lying around. But the obvious thing to do would be to wrap them in a public key.

So I reckon that the decryption tools are fake.

Re:I call Bulshit --- they have not broken crypto

[The MAZZTer]

IIRC No More Ransom handles ransomware that has flawed encryption implementations where it is possible to determine the decryption key far easier than if the encryption was properly implemented and strong enough.

Re:

[Ed Tice]

The ransomeware authors will probably improve their skills as a result of this. So it's not a very good long-term solution. I'm guessing that much of the defeated ransomeware is older stuff that may still be spreading even inadvertently. The latest and greatest will be better implemented.

Re:

[Keramos]

A perfect implementation of those algorithms is possibly unbreakable. The tools would target flawed implementations, which might even be the vast majority. Just using a standard random number generator, or a key generator that produces one bit less than you thought it did - as per the recent issue with a huge range of public keys - can lead to being able to break the encryption, especially if you've got gigabytes or terabytes of data to analyse. Most would be less subtle and more easily detected flaws.

It al

Re:

[Registered Coward v2]

I would not be surprised if they are using one key for everyone, if they are using a key. that way they do not have to figure out what key to send once they are paid; and while they could simply disappear after payment that also means the next victim is less likely to pay since others paid and got burnt. As a result, it makes sense for the criminals to actually follow through and decrypt the files. Of course, you would think organizations would implement better backup measures, such as keeping backups that

phoned home???

[CrimsonAvenger]

And how was this justified, if the software was designed to "phone home" when used???

From previous /. posts over the last few months (years?), I had assumed that software that "phoned home" was a SEVERE violation of privacy, and a threat to Right Thinking People everywhere.

Not to mention a threat to Democracy and civilization as we know it....