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WanaWiki Tool Can Combat WannaCry Virus

If your Windows 7 or XP PC was infected with WannaCry ransomware, there’s a bit of a silver lining. French researchers have developed wanawiki, a software utility that can possibly unlock your computer.

According to CloudVolumes and Comae founder Matt Suiche, the wanawiki tool finds the prime numbers the ransomware uses to come up with a key that will encrypt the PC. After the tool has been run, the software can produce a key that will set the encrypted files free.

For the tool to work properly, the infected PC must not be rebooted. Wanawiki needs to run because the ransomware’s prime numbers can be overwritten. People with infected PCs can download the tool, run it and hope the prime numbers have yet to be overwritten.

The Wanawiki fix has worked on infected Windows 7, Server 2003 and XP software. It’s believed to be able to work on Vista as well. WannaCry has yet to infect Windows 10-operating computers.

Suiche, who teamed up with Delpy for the wanawiki tool, said the software reconstructs the .DKY files Wannacry searches for and keeps it from creating newly encrypted files.

Reports claim that about 200,000 computers around the world have been infected by the WannaCry virus, the number is steadily rising. The problem with the WannaCry virus is that it holds ransom business and public agency computers such as the National Health Service whose money goes towards helping patients, not the IT department.

Microsoft has offered its own patch to address the virus. However, experts say WannaCry isn’t that sophisticated and additional exploits are likely through vulnerabilities the Shadow Brokers group releases.

Experts advise people to back up their important information onto a disconnected storage drive in case they are infected by the ransomware. If the computer becomes infected, they’ll be able to reproduce some of the work they lost.

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Posted by on May 21 2017. Filed under New, Sci/Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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