According to ZDNet, the cost of Ransomware hit $1 billion in 2016. Businesses and unsuspecting users were hit with popular ransomware such as Locky and Crylocker and found themselves locked out of their own systems. Many of those affected by ransomware found themselves paying large sums of money to salvage their business critical documents and even then there was no guarantee the user would regain control of their system.

When it comes to ransomware no one is safe. Most ransomware attacks target machines through the use of phishing, advertisements and downloads. Now you might think that having the latest anti-virus updates and intrusion prevention systems (IPS) in place will protect you…your wrong! Of course these solutions are still relevant but they work on protecting systems using signatures and we can only write signatures based on what we know already, so when it comes to proactively protecting your systems, they often fall down against zero days. We then have the ‘User’ who is considered the weakest link in the network, how do we protect against ransomware then?

Now this may not be the answer to all your questions but recently I came across a potential ransomware solution that can proactively protect against ransomware.

A company called Cybereason have released a software called RansomFree that can proactively protect against ransomware. The software does this by monitoring computer processes for unusual behavior, whereas traditional anti-virus solutions rely on signatures. RansonFree will prompt you if it finds unexpected behavior and will ask you if you have requested to encrypt files before the process is allowed to take place. RansomFree can also remove the threats from your device ensuring nothing is kept lingering and it does this all for FREE, hence the name.

Although this seems to be a new product, Cybereason have done a pretty good job convincing the world that this software can protect against ransomware, what do you think? you can read more about RansomFree here.