Acronis in Partnership With No More Ransom Initiative

Acronis International GmbH announced its partnership with the No More Ransom initiative, joining Europol’s European Cybercrime Centre (EC3) and dozens of other companies and organisations in the fight against ransomware.

Acronis joins as a supporting partner, promoting the project and contributing ransomware intelligence for prevention campaigns.

Ransomware is a type of malware that infects victims’ computers, locks the screen, encrypts their data, and demands a ransom in exchange for a decryption key. Ransomware is the most serious malware threat of the 21st century, costing companies and innocent computers billions of dollars in ransom payments.

“Protecting our customers’ data is our top priority and in the current environment it also means we need protect the data from ransomware. Just having a backup is no longer enough. Realising that restoring data from a backup helps people to avoid paying the ransom, cyber criminals began attacking backup files and backup software. But Acronis came up with a powerful answer – Acronis Active Protection. It recognises such threats and stops ransomware attacks before they do any damage,” Nikolay Grebennikov, Acronis VP of engineering, said.

“Fighting ransomware is all about prevention and education. By joining the No More Ransom initiative we support our partners and law enforcement agencies in the fight against cyber extortionists. Working together will enable us to run effective education campaigns and help our users take a stand against these damaging cyber-attacks without losing data or paying the ransom,” John Zanni, Acronis CMO, added.

Acronis Active Protection is an anti-ransomware technology that is part of Acronis’ data protection and storage products, including Acronis True Image, Acronis Backup 12 and Acronis Backup Cloud. Acronis Active Protection identifies unusual activity on computers in real time and prevents malicious malware from damaging data, backups, and backup software. Cutting-edge behavioral heuristics detects ransomware attacks, making the backup more secure, and reducing a number of times data need to be restored from the backup. Acronis Active Protection technology has been validated and proven to be effective by an independent research organisation, AV-TEST Institute.

No More Ransom was launched in 2016 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 a ransom.