Get the latest tech news

How security experts unravel ransomware

Increasingly, security professionals are coming together with law enforcement to provide free decryption tools — freeing locked files and eliminating the temptation for victims to pony up.

There are a couple main ways that ransomware decryptors go about coming up with tools: reverse engineering for mistakes, working with law enforcement and gathering publicly available encryption keys. If we know that one of the unencrypted words in "J qsfgfs dbut up epht" is supposed to be "cats," we can start to determine what pattern was applied to the original text to get the encrypted result. At its most advanced level, bits of unencrypted "plaintext" data, divided into chunks called "blocks," are put through 14 rounds of transformation, and then output in their encrypted — or "ciphertext" — form.

Get the Android app