A team from CSIRO’s Data 61, University of NSW and UC Berkley in the US found a whole bunch of Android VPN apps contain viruses, spyware and other adware.

Researchers analysed the apps available for Android to look for nasties like trojans, spyware and adware — giving each an “anti-virus rank (AV)” based on what they found. The lower the rank, the better.

They found of the 283 apps they analysed, 38 per cent contained malware or malvertising (malicious advertising containing viruses).

“The findings are alarming and showing some very, very serious security and privacy issues,” Data61 researcher Dali Kaafar said.

“If they embed some malware that means that particular malware can see all the other traffic that is originating from your device.

Source: Viruses, spyware found in ‘alarming’ number of Android VPN apps

a completely proactive and signature-less technology that is able to detect and block even the most dangerous of ransomware variants like CryptoWall4, CryptoLocker, Tesla, and CTB-Locker.

Malwarebytes Anti-Ransomware monitors all activity in the computer and identifies actions which are typical of ransomware activity. It keeps track of all activity and, once it has enough evidence to determine a certain process or thread to be ransomware, blocks the infection and quarantines the ransomware before it has a chance to encrypt users’ files. During development Malwarebytes Anti-Ransomware has blocked every single ransomware variant we have thrown at it. We are extremely satisfied with its results and are excited to bring this technology to our user community for further testing.

As this is the very first beta we do encourage beta users to install the product in non-production environments for testing purposes only.

Source: Introducing Malwarebytes Anti-Ransomware Beta – Anti-Ransomware Beta – Malwarebytes Forums

Bitdefender Anti-Ransomware prevents the following families of ransomware from encrypting your files: CTB-Locker, Locky, Pertya, and TeslaCrypt. Bitdefender cannot guarantee the effectiveness of the tool against different strains of ransomware, nor be held liable for the loss of sensitive data.

Source: Anti Ransomware Tool

Shame…

Cryptostalker and the original project randumb are the work of Sean Williams, a developer from San Francisco. Mr. Williams wanted to create a tool that monitored the filesystem for newly written files, and if the files contained random data, the sign of encrypted content, and they were written at high speed, it would alert the system’s owner.

Right now, the project is only available for Linux, but as you can read below in our interview with Mr. Williams, there’s a plan to port the tool for Windows.

If tests go well enough, then Windows users may have a new method of getting warned against the deadly wave of crypto-ransomware that’s been recently hitting users around the globe.

Source: Cryptostalker, a Tool to Detect Crypto-Ransomware on Linux – EXCLUSIVE

Let’s try to generically thwart OS X ransomware via math! By continually monitoring the file-system for the creation of encrypted files by suspicious processes, RansomWhere? aims to protect your personal files, generically stopping ransomware in its tracks.

Source: Objective-See

Law enforcement and IT Security companies have joined forces to disrupt cybercriminal businesses with ransomware connections.

The “No More Ransom” website is an initiative by the National High Tech Crime Unit of the Netherlands’ police, Europol’s European Cybercrime Centre and two cyber security companies – Kaspersky Lab and Intel Security – with the goal to help victims of ransomware retrieve their encrypted data without having to pay the criminals.

Since it is much easier to avoid the threat than to fight against it once the system is affected, the project also aims to educate users about how ransomware works and what countermeasures can be taken to effectively prevent infection. The more parties supporting this project the better the results can be. This initiative is open to other public and private parties.

Source: The No More Ransom Project

Edit: It seems that this system creates a whole load of bogus files and dirs and monitors them, not the whole file system. This pollutes the file system and means that people can quite easily write around it.

Every ransomware program goes over files, chooses the ones that look interesting, encrypts them and destroys the originals. You know what else does this? Compression software, legitimate encryption applications and backup and cloud-sync solutions in addition to many more programs. The same behavior is exhibited even if you manually compress a directory with a password and then delete it. Since ransomware encrypts any file anywhere on a computer, it’s extremely difficult to distinguish a legitimate file activity from a malicious one. While every encrypted file increases the likelihood that the ransomware will be detected, each encrypted file equals another important piece of information lost. Every second counts when ransomware starts encrypting files.

Cybereason RansomFree: Behavior – Based Ransomware Blocking Freeware

Cybereason researched more than 40 ransomware strains, including Locky, Cryptowall, TeslaCrypt, Jigsaw and Cerber and identified the behavioral patterns that distinguish ransomware from legitimate applications. Whether a criminal group or nation created the program, all ransomware functions the same way and encrypts as many files as possible. These programs can’t determine what files are important so they encrypt everything based on file extensions.

RansomFree, Cybereason’s behavioral anti-ransomware free tool, takes all these challenges into consideration. By putting multiple deception methods in place, RansomFree detects ransomware as soon as encryption occurs either on a computer or network drive. Once encryption is detected, RansomFree suspends it, displays a popup that warns users their files are at risk and enables them to stop the attack.

RansomFree protects against local encryption as well as the encryption of files on network or shared drives. The encryption of shared files is among the doomsday scenarios an organization can imagine. It takes only one employee on the network to execute ransomware and affect the entire company.

Source: Cybereason Introduces: Free Behavioral-Based Ransomware Blocking

Interesting. Unfortunately Windows only.

New research from Lancaster University, Northwest University in China, and the University of Bath, which benefitted from funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), shows for the first time that attackers can crack Pattern Lock reliably within five attempts by using video and computer vision algorithm software.

By covertly videoing the owner drawing their Pattern Lock shape to unlock their device, while enjoying a coffee in a busy café for example, the attacker, who is pretending to play with their phone, can then use software to quickly track the owner’s fingertip movements relative to the position of the device. Within seconds the algorithm produces a small number of candidate patterns to access the Android phone or tablet.

The attack works even without the video footage being able to see any of the on-screen content, and regardless of the size of the screen. Results are accurate on video recorded on a mobile phone from up to two and a half metres away – and so attacks are more covert than shoulder-surfing. It also works reliably with footage recorded on a digital SLR camera at distances up to nine metres away.

Researchers evaluated the attack using 120 unique patterns collected from independent users. They were able to crack more than 95 per cent of patterns within five attempts.

Complex patterns, which use more lines between dots, are used by many to make it harder for observers to replicate. However, researchers found that these complex shapes were easier to crack because they help the fingertip algorithm to narrow down the possible options.

During tests, researchers were able to crack all but one of the patterns categorised as complex within the first attempt. They were able to successfully crack 87.5 per cent of median complex patterns and 60 per cent of simple patterns with the first attempt.

Source: Your Android device’s Pattern Lock can be cracked within five attempts