Expert finds ‘digital vaccine’ for Petya ransomware

A cyber security expert has been reported to have found a digital vaccine to protect computers against crippling Petya ransomware.

TheNewsGuru reported Petya ransomware wrecked havoc, causing major scare around the world in the wake of the week.

In the wake of Petya attack, computers around the globe — including those in Ukraine, Russia, US — were affected by the new strain of ransomware that has been likened to Wannacry.

The malicious software locks up computer files with all-but-unbreakable encryption and then demands a ransom to disinfect the files, which, According to Bleeping Computer news site is now pointless and not recommended as a security researcher has found a vaccine for it.

Bleeping Computer news site report that the vaccine found by Cybereason security researcher Amit Serper is, however, not a killswitch for the ravaging ransomware. It noted that other experts agreed with Serper’s findings.

“Because of the ransomware’s global outreach, many researchers flocked to analyze it, hoping to find a loophole in its encryption or a killswitch domain that would stop it from spreading, similar to WannaCry.

“While analyzing the ransomware’s inner workings, Serper was the first to discover that NotPetya would search for a local file and would exit its encryption routine if that file already existed on disk,” Bleeping Computer reported.

“This means victims can create that file on their PCs, set it to read-only, and block the NotPetya ransomware from executing.

“While this does prevent the ransomware from running, this method is more of a vaccination than a kill switch.

“This is because each computer user must independently create this file, compared to a “switch” that the ransomware developer could turn on to globally prevent all ransomware infections,” the report added.

>>Read: How to vaccinate your PC against the NotPetya/Petna/Petya virus