Adding a Russian Keyboard to Protect against Ransomware sounds like an urban legend or fake news. But apparently there is a sound reasoning behind it, basically the authorities in Russia don’t prosecute for cyber crime unless a Russian company or resident files a complaint. So by ensuring no Russian computers are infected the various Ransomware authors keep themselves safe from investigation and prosecution.
There was various ways to check if a computer in in Russia but the easiest option is to check if the computer has the Russian/Cyrillic keyboard installed. Apparently this includes Ransomware like DarkSide which infected the Colonial Oil pipeline earlier this month. The full list of exclusions are as below. Simply put, the malware checks for the presence of one of these languages on the system, and aborts teh install if any of them are found.
List of excluded languages
Will this protect your system against all malware? Of course not. But it is a good step to do if you are running windows and there is no harm in having an extra language installed on your computer. (Unless you are one of the rabid anti-russia type folks).
Brian’s post has a lot more details about this Ransomware and some of the other protection steps that you can take. You can check it out here: Try This One Weird Trick Russian Hackers Hate
– Suramya