Here is a very good account of how a techie more or less accidentally found the off switch for this weeks ransomware attack.

It’s not really an accident, though the techie, one “MalwareTech”, describes it as such.

Basically, he has a procedure, and a check list of sorts for evaluating this sort of thing.

Because he followed this procedure, he found that the software phoned home to an unregistered domain, and he registered that domain, and its existence functioned as a kill switch.

As I’ve said before, this is not an accident: this is a byproduct of proper procedures.

Much like a pilot’s preflight checklist, success is a byproduct of a deliberate process, and not some random stroke of luck.

As Baseballer Branch Ricky pithily noted, “Luck is a residue of Design.”