Ransomware is a special breed of malware that encrypts your personal files and then demands a ransom for their decryption. It is a serious crime and the criminals seem to have been making millions in profit every year through this. We have mentioned several times that the only effective way to thwart such attacks is by keeping regular backups of all of your important files. If you have backup of your files then you do not have worry about malware attacks and can easily restore files from your backups. In addition, security researchers have also developed some tools to remove such ransomware and some of these tools can actually decrypt your files without you having to pay the ransom to the criminals.
One of the security professional, Jada Cyrus, has now aggregated together all such tools to fight against ransomware attacks and has made the collection available by the name of Ransomware Response Kit. This kit contains tools developed by various security firms like Trend Micro, Kaspersky, McAfee etc., and can help you quickly remove the ransomware infection from your system.
The recommended approach for using this Ransomware Response Kit should be as follows:
- When you see the ransomware indication on a computer (usually they show instructions for paying the ransom on your screen), isolate that computer from your network (if it is connected to a network).
- Use the Ransomware Response Kit to detect and remove the ransomware.
- Restore all the files from your backups.
- Scan all the computers on the network for malware before connecting the isolated computer back to the network.
You should note that the efficacy of using the Ransomware Response Kit depends entirely on you keeping a regular backup of your files. This is very easy these days as hard disks and USB flash disks are cheaper than ever before. Moreover, multi gigabytes of online cloud storage is being offered by many reliable companies like Google, Microsoft, Dropbox etc. You can make use of software like Uranium Backup, Easeus Todo Backup, or Ocster backup for making regular backups.
Ransomware Response Kit may not be able to remove all the infections, so it is necessary that you scan the system with a full fledged security product. Most of the security firms produce software to protect entire network and you should invest in such products to protect your computers from getting infected in the future.
You can download Ransomware Response Kit from https://bitbucket.org/jadacyrus/ransomwareremovalkit/.