In the first of its kind move, the Europol and Dutch National Police on a joint note have issued a free decryption tool for those databases which have been locked by GandCrab ransomware. The tool will be available at no cost on ‘No More Ransom Portal’ and will help the victims in unlocking the systems without the need to pay a ransom in cryptocurrency to hackers.
“The new tool resolves infections on versions 5.0.4 and 5.1 and will be available at no cost along with other versions such as 1,4 and early versions of 5”, says the EU’s law enforcement intelligence agency-Europol.
Cybersecurity Insiders has learned that the web portal ‘No more Ransom’ launched in 2016 will be hosted on Amazon Web Services and will be backed by the network security solutions, software and hardware from Baracuda Networks, Kaspersky Lab and McAfee.
The news is out that the latest GandCrab decryptor was developed by security researchers from Bitdefender and Europol in association with the Romanian Police.
Law enforcement authorities from Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands and UK, and Canada along with FBI have also put in some effort to make the GandCrab decryptor an open source.
Developers of GandCrab seem to be super smart in marketing as they have announced a crypter competition in Sept’19 to decide on which malware service they have to pair with- which was eventually won by NTCrypt.
Coming back to the repercussions of GandCrab ransomware, the security researchers from the EUROPOL have confirmed that the developers are known to demand the ransom in Dash and Bitcoin with the demand ranging in between $300 to $6,000. What’s interesting in this payment drama is those paying through BTC will be charged another 10% premium because dash currency is pretty tough to track.
EUROPOL stats say that the new tool happens to be the 3rd of its kind with the first releasing in Feb’18 and the second in October’18. Both the two decryption versions were reportedly downloaded by victims more than 400,000 times and have helped over 10,000 victims by saving $5 million in ransomware payment.
Let’s hope, the third version of decrypting GandCrab ransomware brings in the same success and even more!
