Victims of the latest incarnations of GandCrab ransomware now have a way to recover their files without paying a single penny to the extortionists, thanks to the release of a decryption.
BitDefender said this week it has partnered with eight government law enforcement agencies – including the FBI , the British police and Europol – to develop software that can decrypt documents encrypted by various ransomware variants circulating under the GandCrab banner. The decryption tools, available for free from the No More Ransom Project, are capable of unlocking files encrypted by the latest version 5.2 of the notorious Windows ransomware .
The hope is that, with victims now able to decrypt encrypted files on their own, fewer people will pay the ransom and the creators of GandCrab will have less incentive to continue spreading the ransomware.
But that's very difficult, given how ridiculously successful the ransomware has been to date and the cat-and-mouse game that's been going on between GandCrab's developers and security companies for almost 18 months.
“In more than a year of operation, we estimate that GandCrab has reached 1.5 million victims worldwide, both in home users and businesses ,” BitDefender noted . “GandCrab operators and collaborators have claimed in private forums recently that the group behind the malware has earned more than $2 billion from victims .”
There is also some hope that the operators of GandCrab will actually make good on their promise and stop the spread of the ransomware. Without new variants being developed and decryption tools that support the latest versions, GandCrab would theoretically disappear.
Even if GandCrab had been eliminated, the ransomware remains a busy and profitable market, so much so that some experts have wondered whether it would be better for businesses and users to simply pay the ransom in some cases.
