Today at Black Hat London, Zero Networks announced the release of its RPC firewall – also dubbed the ‘ransomware kill switch’ – into open source. The tool provides granular control over RPC, capable of blocking the use of lateral movement hacker tools and stopping almost all ransomware in its tracks.

Microsoft’s Remote Procedure Call (MS-RPCE) lies at the heart of Windows. It effectively manages the relationship between clients and servers – if a client requests from a server, it goes through RPC; This happens both locally and between remote devices.