Protect yourself from ransomware

Have you heard of RansomFree from Cybereason and would you recommend it?

As the threat of ransomware grows, utilities that are specifically designed to protect users from becoming victims are hitting the market.

Ransomware is malware that attempts to gain access to your computer with the intent of locking you out of your own personal files and demanding a ransom to unlock them.

The level of encryption being used by current versions of ransomware is so sophisticated that your only options are to pay the ransom or lose everything if you don’t have a separate offsite backup.

What RansomFree does

to alert you, a small number of files will be sacrificed with the hope that it’s the files that they set up as the honeypot.

While RansomFree’s approach is unique and inventive, there’s a problem that the entire security industry has struggled with since the beginning of time: They’re all playing whack-a-mole.

Just as RansomFree was created by examining what ransomware programs typically do, malware authors can conversely see what RansomFree is doing and change up their scripts to avoid or delay detection.

There could eventually even be direct mitigation code that would attempt to disable the program if it becomes widely used, so as always, it’s a moving target.

What this should tell you is that no one layer of protection should ever be relied upon when it comes to the threat of ransomware.

Unlike a lot of other malicious activity floating around the internet, ransomware has proven to be a solid moneymaker for cybercrime syndicates, which ensures that they’ll continue to evolve their threats in order to sidestep any security layers as they’re developed.

Ken Colburn is founder and CEO of Data Doctors Computer Services (https://datadoctors.com).. Ask any tech question at https://facebook.com/Data Doctors or on Twitter, @TheDataDoc.