Ransom Away

The Internet is quite a dangerous place, and a single wrong click can allow a whole bunch of malware attacks to reach your computer. Things can get pretty bad, especially in the case of ransomware infection, where your files are encrypted until a substantial amount of money is paid. Luckily, there are various prevention tools apart from paying extra attention online, with Ransom Away being a suitable example.

The application comes in a pretty lightweight package and doesn’t want to waste any time in protecting you against ransomware attacks. Note, however, that it mainly targets the Petya ransomware family. It’s a good idea to run the program when your computer is clean, because functions here are mainly used to prevent attacks rather than abolish them.

It’s a good idea to run the program with administrator privileges since it’s about to create a file in the system directory, but it can usually perform just fine with any type of launch. The window can feel a little confusing since there’s little to no information regarding the operation, but there is a button to start.

The overall operation doesn’t take more than a couple of seconds. The process log section shows operation status, and a prompt also shows up in the end. Running the program once on a computer is generally enough to keep you safe.

What the application actually does is to create a Windowsperfc.dat in the system directory. This is because it’s found that the Petya ransomware attack doesn’t run it’s encryption-side of the process if it encounters this file as read-only on your computer.

Ransom Away is the type of application to use before venturing off into unknown corners of the Internet. It doesn’t clean or decrypt your files, but rather takes advantage of a weakness in Petya and prevents it from being functional on your computer.