The GandCrab ransomware family emerged in late February 2018 and was quickly adopted by cybercriminals because it offered something no other ransomware family had offered before: custom ransom amounts. While the average user would be reluctant to spend as much as $500 to get their data back, organizations and companies would be far more interested in paying larger amounts of money. Currently, the most prolific versions of GandCrab are versions 4 and 5, which are estimated to have infected around 500,000 victims worldwide since July 2018. Considering the lowest ransom amount is $600 and almost half of infected victims give in to ransomware, the developers might have made at least $300 million in the past couple of months alone. And actual financial losses could be significantly higher, considering that some victims have reported ransom amounts of $700,000. Bitdefender released a free decryption tool for recent versions of GandCrab, which lets victims around the world retrieve encrypted information without paying the hackers. Bitdefender claims that in the past 5 days the tool has successfully decrypted data belonging to over 1,700 entities. WaterISAC first reported on GandCrab in early June 2018 based on information provided by the NCCIC, which identified state and local government agencies as being targeted by the ransomware. Bitdefender.