Prevention Guide for Petya Ransomware
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. The researcher's initial findings have been later confirmed by other security researchers, such as PT Security , TrustedSec , and Emsisoft. 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. How to Enable the NotPetya/Petna/Petya Vaccine To vaccinate your computer so that you are unable to get infected with the current strain of NotPetya/Petya/Petna (yeah, this naming is annoying), simply create a file