Whereas most ransomware protection is extremely simple, Heilig Defense RansomOff stands out for its complexity. It does a decent job in testing, but the average user will probably want more streamlined protection.
CyberSight RansomStopper offers free, dedicated ransomware protection, and it now handles ransomware that launches at Windows startup. It's a winner, and free.
Check Point ZoneAlarm Anti-Ransomware remains one of the most effective ransomware-specific security tools we've tested. It detected all our real-world ransomware samples, though its recovery system missed some files.
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Back in 2013, the news reports were full of a ransomware threat called CryptoLocker. It was a big deal, until a multinational task force neutralized it in 2014. CryptoPrevent dates to that same era, as it was originally created to aid in recovery from CryptoLocker. The current CryptoPrevent Premium aims to work alongside your antivirus, providing ransomware-specific protection at a range of security levels. Unfortunately, even at its highest security level, the latest version failed when we tested it with real-world ransomware.
This isn’t the first time we’ve put CryptoPrevent through rigorous testing. It didn’t do well in our previous review, but four years and 11 versions have elapsed, so we opted to give it another try. At the time of that earlier review, it was one of about a dozen ransomware-specific utilities. That list has dwindled to just a handful, making a new review of CryptoPrevent all the more important.