Ransomware, a nasty and, unfortunately, common subclass of malware, are really bad news. The good news, however, is that K7’s heuristic, dynamic behaviour-based anti-ransomware feature, Ransomware Protection, was “productionised” and released some time ago. We strongly believe Ransomware Protection will provide users with robust safeguards against various strains of crypto ransomware, from the past (e.g. CryptoLocker), the present (e.g. Locky) and the future (???).
Ransomware Protection’s blocking logic is based on recognising and arresting fundamental changes that take place in targeted files when the ransomware’s industry-grade encryption algorithms are applied to them.
At the Virus Bulletin 2015 international security conference we demonstrated a PoC of the anti-ransomware technology in our presentation “Dead and Buried in Their Crypts: Defeating Modern Ransomware”, and explained how the technology works in some detail so that all of us in the security industry could implement an effective strategy against this highly-damaging type of malware.
Elevating a PoC to a full-blown production-level feature is a time-consuming process since many factors related to stability, false positives and performance need to be considered in an end user environment. We are delighted to have been able to develop and release an anti-ransomware jab which will boost end-user resistance to any ransomware attack. Your precious documents, images and videos should now be safe. Note, we still highly recommend that you backup your important files as the spectre of bad sectors developing on your hard drive continues to loom large.
Samir Mody, Senior Manager, K7 Threat Control Lab
Gregory Panakkal, Senior Software Architect, K7 Product Engineering Team
