On the heels of the recent WannaCry attack, Europe has been hit with a new ransomware variant known as Petya. Ukraine reported ransom demands targeting the government and key infrastructure, and the Danish Maersk conglomerate said many of its systems were down.

This ransomware uses an entirely different technique and relies on social engineering via email to download the malicious file, either as a ZIP or PDF. This file then executes code that infects the Master Boot Record (MBR) of your machine and upon reboot locks your entire machine. At this point it will then proceed to encrypt the hard drive.

To protect yourself from infection it is important that users DO NOT CLICK “Allow” when you are asked to execute any application you are not familiar with.

More details of this attack will be updated as it is discovered.