By Catalin Cimpanu – Avast and Emsisoft, two cyber-security firms known for their antivirus products, released today free decrypters that can help victims of the BigBobRoss ransomware recover their files without paying the ransom demand.

The two decrypters are available for download from the Avast and Emsisoft sites, respectively.

The ransomware is one of the smaller strains that has been silently infecting victims for the past two months while larger ransomware operations like GandCrab, Ryuk, BitPaymer, SamSam, or Matrix have been grabbing all the headlines.

Emsisoft security researcher Michael Gillespie told ZDNet that the first sighting of BigBobRoss was on January 14, when some victims tried to identify the ransomware via ID-Ransomware, a service Gillespie built years ago to help victims determine the name of the ransomware that infected their systems. Read more: