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This security tool could help stop the problem of ransomware in its tracks

Scientists at the University of Florida developed software that can stop ransomware before it does any serious damage.

SEEING YOUR DEVICE, be it your smartphone or laptop, infected by malware is never a good thing, but some are more damaging than others.

One particularly bad example of this is ransomware, which allows an attacker to encrypt and hold your data before demanding a fee for its return. Payment usually goes in the form of bitcoin which is also encrypted and difficult to trace.

But a way to prevent such a thing from happening could be in hand as a team of researchers from the University of Florida developed software which can detect and stop ransomware.

The solution, called CryptoDrop, is able to stop it from carrying out its task by detecting a number of factors early on. By noticing what it’s doing to a user’s files, it’s able to spot it and stop it from encrypting files.

In tests, it was able to detect ransomware 100% of the time, using 492 real-world ransomware samples. It was able to stop the process after an average of 10 files had been encrypted.

“Through reduction of the number of files lost, we demonstrate that CryptoDrop reduces the need for the victim to pay the ransom, choking attackers’ revenue and rendering the malware ineffective,” said the team in their report.

With few files lost, the burden to pay for victims of ransomware is reduced or remove, protecting users and dismantling the economy of attackers.

The team currently has a working prototype that compatible with Windows and is looking for a commercial partner to help bring the software to the public.

Read: Pokémon Go makers say they’re updating iOS app to address security concerns >

Read: Game developer gets in trouble for paying PewDiePie and others for positive reviews >

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9 Comments
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    Mute Red hurley
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    Jul 12th 2016, 5:14 PM

    Why do i always get the feeling the anti virus people, are busy coming up with these viruses to get us to buy their software that can stop it.

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    Mute Reuben Gray
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    Jul 12th 2016, 5:23 PM

    It’s not a virus, anti-virus won’t help. It’s mostly done by Eastern Europeans/Russians to the point that most of the variants check your region first. If you are in Russia or Ukraine etc, it removes itself without doing any damage.

    In our case, we use windows server FSRM rules to prevent it encrypting network locations. It’s not 100% but it stops most infections and identifies the infected machine.

    If people would just stop being stupid and stopped clicking everything they see on the internet and opening every attachment they get in emails, they wouldn’t get infected in the first place.

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    Mute Bren MC
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    Jul 12th 2016, 5:43 PM

    You can get randomware in videos so its not always the attachment that delivers it. The best solution and one thats rarely or never discussed is sandboxing your browser with sandboxie. The only thing the malware can encrypt is the virtual drive created by sandboxie in which case you just delete the sandbox and start again.

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    Mute Bren MC
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    Jul 12th 2016, 5:44 PM

    *ransomware.

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    Mute Stephen Coveney
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    Jul 12th 2016, 5:18 PM

    Pretty sure Bitdefender has this already. They call it Behavioural Scanning which analyses if a process is doing something out of the ordinary and kills it. Also tries to roll back the changes made

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    Mute Nick Allen
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    Jul 12th 2016, 7:11 PM

    Although not 100% effective a way to remove a lot of the ransomware attacks is to stop looking for porn and dodgy sites.

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    Mute Odhran MacMurchadha
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    Jul 12th 2016, 8:46 PM

    Lot of shit comes in through social media also.
    A friend of mine had his computer infected from Facebook.

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    Mute Frank's Cat
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    Jul 12th 2016, 9:50 PM

    Or at least that’s what “your friend” told his missus.

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    Mute HelloGoogleTracking!
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    Jul 14th 2016, 8:22 PM

    100% solution.

    Have backups of all your files, then if encrypted, no problem, don’t need to pay anyone for this software.

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