Ransomware Defender

Ransomware Defender is a security application that comes packed with all the features of an antivirus solution. However, it focuses on protecting your PC from ransomware. This is a type of malware that hijacks and locks your system, usually displaying a message to hold it for ransom.

This tool has a real-time engine made to prevent ransomware agents from infiltrating the PC, three scanning modes to find and remove infected files, a quarantine manager, and advanced scan configuration settings for experienced users.

Make sure that your PC has .NET Framework to be able to work with this app. It gets integrated into the Windows autostart sequence automatically during installation, which means that it runs every time you start your computer to turn on its protection modules.

Also, it creates an icon in the systray that gives you the possibility to access the control panel of Ransomware Defender, run scans directly, check for virus definition updates, temporarily disable the real-time engine, or shut down the program.

The appearance of the anti-ransomware utility is similar to many antimalware applications, due to the dark theme and design. Ransomware Defender can scan the computer in quick mode, which means that it only searches for ransomware in common hiding spots.

Meanwhile, the deep scan takes into account all places on your hard drive, while custom scan mode needs you to indicate the exact folders with suspicious files. Unfortunately, context menu integration for custom scans isn't supported.

If you want to change the default scan configuration, you can tinker with the list of file extensions to be taken into account for scans, automatic actions on infections, whether or not to autoscan USB drives when they're plugged into the PC, blocking encrypted files, phishing detection, and others.

In a different tab, it's possible to review history of scans, access the quarantine to examine files, permanently delete them or restore them to their original location on the disk, manage exclusions and scheduled tasks, and check for definition updates.

Also, there are three distinct tools provided by Ransomware Defender for cleaning system history to protect your privacy, shredding files to make sure they cannot be recovered with specialized software, and for disabling autorun programs to improve Windows boot time.

The anti-ransomware tool left a small footprint on the computer's performance in our tests and carried out scans quickly. Unfortunately, it failed in some cases to identify ransomware so we can only assume that its definitions need a bit more work. Otherwise, the interface is modern and easy to use, and experienced users are free to change scan settings.