It was an FBI report that managed to convince people that the damage that had been rendered by ransomware in 2017 was not going to repeat itself in 2018. It contained the genuinely positively signs that ransomware attacks had gone down and had witnessed a gradual decline in the past three months.
It was minor but welcome news. The positivity didn’t last long as it soon became evident that the reason the attacks had gone down is because ransomwares were focusing more on quality than quantity now. There is still no ransomware removal tool on the market that can deal with these. Whatever programs are available on the market do not offer concrete ways to remove ransomware.
On top of that obvious bad news, there have been further reports that the escalation in ransomware attacks might already be taking place. The number of ransomware attacks in the past month has steadily increased. This is followed by several other revelations that there has been little or no update in the development of ransomware removal tools.
All this may have been set into motion after the city district of Atlanta was held hostage and ended up bowing to the demands made by the hackers. Since then, there has been virtually no update on the development of any process that can effectively remove ransomware. Forget remove ransomware, there’s an extreme shortage of quality software that can even detect ransomware attacks.
2015 marked the trend where cyber thieves began shifting from stealing information to encrypting it and then demanding ransom for its decryption. At first it was just one of the several Internet scams that were meant to scare domestic users into paying the ransom. However, the entry of WannaCry and NotPetya took the entire genre to an unprecedented height. It turned ransomware from a public nuisance to a national-level threat within months.
And despite such magnanimous developments, there’s no ransomware removal tool that customers and businesses can safely rely on if they ever become infected with ransomware. There is hope that there will some form of a potent way to combat this menace by the end of 2018.
