Shortly after an FBI agent publicly encouraged ransomware victims to pay off their attackers, some arrests and leaks have lead to the release of a number of private keys maintained by some ransomware authors. Allegedly all of the keys for Coinvault and Bitcryptor ransomware have been acquired and persons alleged to have connections to the schemes have been arrested. Adware vendors Bitdefender (archived) and Kaspersky Labs (archived) have released free adware1 tools to decrypt files related to these ransomware products, though caution is advised as the decryption tools from these providers and those from others have the potential to be at least as malicious as the original ransomware.
It is important to accurately categorize software according to what it really does instead of what it is marketed as. Their free products advertise their paid products and their paid products advertise still more premium paid products. ↩