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.