Sunday, May 21, 2017

Somewhat larger amount of hope for users hit with WannaCrypt

A while ago, someone published Wannakey, a program that can, under some circumstances, extract the private key generated by WannaCrypt. It was only guaranteed to do its job on Windows XP, and was not at the time paired with anything that uses that key to save the encrypted files.

Someone else built on that foundation to create Wanakiwi, which extracts the private key from the running WannaCrypt process and then uses it to repair all the files it can find. It works on Windows 7 as well as Windows XP. There is still an element of chance - the keys could have been overwritten in memory - and a reboot after infection would blow away the whole prospect, but Wanakiwi is much more hope for affected users.

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