Encryption programs are not as common as Adware, but much more unpleasant. Get on your computer, it can, along with any unlicensed software or application that you downloaded, God knows from which source. It blocks your computer or smartphone and requires a "redemption" for the key-decoder. But do not rush to pay. If you have experienced such an unpleasant incident, first go to nomoreransom.org. Here the keys are handed out for free.
The service was created by the Netherlands police in cooperation with Europol and large anti-virus companies. For today, about 5000 keys have been distributed to the victims of cybercriminals through the site.
The idea of creating such a service appeared in the framework of the investigation of the CoinVault campaign. Brothers of 19 and 22 years living in the Netherlands, wrote a virus-extortioner who, getting to the victim's computer, blocked all files. For decryption, scammers demanded a ransom in bitcoins, while the program ran a countdown - if the victim did not pay for several days, the amount grew.
But the scammers were out of luck. One of the victims was an IT person from Switzerland, who tracked the server on which the virus was stored, called the company that served him, and demanded a decryption key from his data. The company reported the incident to the anti-cybercriminals department of the Netherlands police and handed over the keys of all the victims to CoinVault. As it turned out, this encryption software infected more than 140,000 computers around the world. To distribute these keys to the victims, in 2015 the No More Ransome project was launched.
Of course, not all campaigns for the spread of extortion software can be found, and it is very difficult to disclose such crimes. But the keys to at least seven campaigns are already available on nomoreransom.org. If you are a victim of an unidentified campaign, the Dutch police officers recommend not to pay scammers, but to postpone the encrypted hard drive and from time to time check to see if the key appeared on the site, as its database is constantly replenished.