Has anyone encountered Ransomware - WannaCry

[ahmedwaqas92]

Hey guys,

My IT dept is going absolutely paranoid, since Ransomware (WannaCry) hit the IT industry globally. Just wanted to check has anyone from here might have had any interaction or first hand experience of this cyber threat ??

Any help on the matter would be appreciated !!

 

[marlonbrowndo]

No. but does it make you wannacry?

 

[ahmedwaqas92]

No. but does it make you wannacry?

Apparently it does (From what I've heard and read about)

$300 in bit coins which would be doubled to 600 if payment not made in 3 days and if the payment is overdue more than 7 days then files are encrypted permanently.

 

[marlonbrowndo]

Apparently it does (From what I've heard and read about)

$300 in bit coins which would be doubled to 600 if payment not made in 3 days and if the payment is overdue more than 7 days then files are encrypted permanently.

Damn that's terrible. No way around it?

 

[ahsan17]

Haven't encountered it, but writing ransomware isn't terribly difficult. The hard part is finding a way to get the ransomware onto the system, for which they used an exploit in older windows versions. And yes, once your system is encrypted there is no solution. If you have your data backed up somewhere then you might be OK, otherwise you have to give the 'ransom'. From what I understand, it uses AES encryption, so it will literally take several million years to decrypt if done in a brute force way (which is the only way known to break AES).

 

[Couch Cricketer]

Damn that's terrible. No way around it?

Someone released a work around for windows xp. At the end of the day if you are still on xp or using pirated windows so don't update your os you will sooner or later get hit by this or another such malware.

 

[ahsan17]

All you can do is prevent getting hit from WannaCry. If your hard drive gets encrypted then there's no work around. Anyone trying to sell a solution to that problem is lying to you.

The older version of WannaCry apparently had a kill switch that ran before the drive got encrypted, and stopped it in its tracks before it encrypted anything. The newer version doesn't have that kill switch.

 

[Zak_Fan]

People sticking to Windows XP had it coming. Funny thing is, many of them would still prefer that outdated junk over a simple upgrade.

 

[TahirFan]

Windows XP is the most common operating system in many parts of Africa

Africa is full of minerals and so I am surprised that the attackers have not targeted Africa and demanded gold bars or diamonds

 

[jeetu]

This again proves why DVD's are still the safest medium for storage. First thing i did after i heard about wannacry , i took backup of all Family/Project related data on fresh set of dvd's.