Victims of Petya ransomware have experienced a lock screen warning that their hard drive was encrypted with a military grade encryption algorithm and the only way to unlock it was to cough up the bitcoins to purchase a decryption key. But hey, that’s no longer true as the encryption has been defeated and a password generator has been developed so victims can decrypt their hard drives for free.

If you aren’t someone who pays attention to new variants of ransomware, then Petya has been described by BleepingComputer, F-Secure, G Data, Kasperksy Lab, Trend Micro and more. In a nutshell, it is a nasty one since it doesn’t just selectively encrypt documents, pictures or other specific files; oh no, it locks up a victim’s entire hard drive by overwriting the master boot record.

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