AstroBoy Online Forums

I heard of this new threat of losing our data from our hard drives. As I have NORTON, i do not expect that I am vulnerable anyway, but TECHSPOT has an article about it. TECHSPOT gave this link for a vaccination. Apparently, the current version of the attack can be avoided by simply creating a file in the WINDOWS directory. a discussion and batch file are here. I myself opened it in the editor just to be sure I was not screwing myself by running it. Farther down on the page is the complete text /code for the batch file, for those interested in making their own batch files, just to be on the safe side.
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/vaccine-not-killswitch-found-for-petya-notpetya-ransomware-outbreak/

Anyway, after I ran the batch file, I opened the Windows directory, & checked that the files had been created with the read only attribute. I do not know if NORTON WILL delete these files.

I heard that Petya and WannaCry are similar in terms of how does they attack the data. Are they really similar, or they are two different things?

They are from the same source code. The author(s) just created a new version that "fixed" some if its shortcomings and changed a few features.