Acronis has made its AI-based anti-ransomware technology available at no charge.
As foreshadowed, Acronis has released Acronis Ransomware Protection, a standalone implementation of its AI-based Acronis Active Protection technology.
Acronis Ransomware Protection is designed to work alongside anti-malware and backup software. It detects and blocks ransomware attacks, and helps recover any files that were encrypted.
It includes a general cloud backup capability, and includes 5GB of online storage.
{loadposition stephen08}"Acronis is deeply concerned by what the explosion of ransomware means to businesses and consumers worldwide," said Acronis co-founder and CEO Serguei Beloussov.
"Our mission is data protection and ransomware puts everyone's data at risk. With Acronis Ransomware Protection, we're making ransomware a less viable tool for criminals, and protecting the data of individuals, families, and businesses."
Acronis Ransomware Protection is initially available for Windows 7 SP1 to Windows 10.
You might have thought - we certainly did - that by now most people who use computers would know about ransomware and what it dies. But no.
A survey conducted earlier this month by Acronis showed that almost half of adult Australian internet users didn't know what ransomware was.
We'd like to think iTWire readers are relatively cluey, but just in case: ransomware is a form of malware that encrypts files, making them unusable. The criminals behind these activities promise to provide the decryption key if the victim pays a ransom - often in Bitcoin or other cryptocurrency - but experience shows that paying up does not guarantee that a working key will be received.
Back to the survey results: 46.6% did not know what ransomware was, 47.3% said they knew that other people had been affected by it, and 6.1% said they had been personally affected.
And only 7.8% said they had heard about WannaCry or NotPetya - two 2017 examples of ransomware.
You might think that level of awareness seems a bit low, but it was better than the international results combining users in the US, UK, Australia, Japan, Germany, France and Spain: 56% didn't know what ransomware was, and 9.2% knew about WannaCry or NotPetya. Yet only 5% of all respondents said they had been affected by ransomware.
55.5% of Australian respondents said they would use free anti-ransomware software, with 45.2% qualifying that to would need to come from a reputable company.