There’s a nasty piece of malware out there called CoinVault that locks down infected PCs’ files, and demands money to unlock them. It wants Bitcoin, to be exact, as the digital currency is entirely anonymous and thus well-suited to criminal activity.

Cheekily, CoinVault’s ransomware software gives you a time limit within which to respond, and when that runs out the cost to decrypt your files rises.

Fortunately, TheNextWeb reports that Kaspersky and the Dutch’s National High Tech Crime Unit (NHTCU) have secured a CoinVault server and seized a bunch of encryption keys from the malware devs which have helped them to develop an anti-ransomware tool that has been made available to the public.

A free decryption program, as well as a step-by-step tutorial on how to go about unlocking encrypted files stolen by the CoinVault malware campaign have been posted to Kaspersky’s anti-ransomware website, so if your PC has been infected that’s where you need to go.

We took a look at the instructions and they are fairly complex, but then encryption and decryption isn’t exactly grade-school maths so that’s to be expected. If you’re not overly familiar with PCs, we recommend enlisting the aid of a professional computer support person to help you sort things out.

Apparently the investigation that yielded the CoinVault seizure is still ongoing as the secured server is but one of many, and as such not all decryption keys are in the possession of the good guys quite yet. So if you follow the instructions on Kaspersky’s site and you don’t get your files back, you will have to wait a bit longer until more keys are discovered.

Of course, prevention is better than cure, so Kaspersky puts in a punt for its multi-device Internet Security suite that should stop attackers from gaining access to your PC in the first place.

[Source – TheNextWeb]