Gadgetory

hey guys this is Austin and this is something that you never want to see so you probably heard of ransomware it is absolutely everywhere right now and one of the biggest attacks was actually on a hospital system in the UK where hundreds of computers were not only made basically useless but more importantly there were tons of documents on patients information test results and they were all essentially lost this is not an isolated incident it is happening worldwide and not only is it affecting normal people's computers but it's also attacking things like banks and gas stations pretty much anything that they can get its hands on but what is ransomware so this actually isn't a new thing the viruses of course have been around for pretty much as long as computers have been but ransomware is a slightly different take on it generally malware isn't this malicious so sure if you get a virus you might have pop ups or your computer might be a part of a botnet but what ransomware does is it literally hold your files ransom until you pay and even if you pay there's no guarantee that you'll actually get any of your information back once infected the ransomware will start looking through all of your files so we'll find things like pictures video music documents pretty much anything you can get its hands on and start encrypting it and once these files are encrypted and it doesn't take long they're basically totally useless to you unless you have the key which they just so happen to have and will offer to unlock for you for a very reasonable fee generally speaking once you have actually had your files encrypted there's really nothing you can do about it rinse and we were like this has been around for a few years now what's different is that there's a new much more dangerous version of it around want to cry originally this was an exploit found by the NSA called eternal blue where they presumably used it for super secret spy stuff however one of their servers was actually leaked and lots of their tools were available publicly including this one where bad things started happening paternal blue is an exploit in windows networking that is especially dangerous because you don't need to be doing anything wrong to be affected so you take that and you combine it with ransomware and you have a very dangerous combination the good news is that Microsoft has already released a patch to deal with this exploit but to show you how big of a deal this is they even released an emergency patch for Windows XP which came out in 2001 if your computer is fully up to date you are safe from want to cry but of course third loss and lots and lots of computers that are not fully up to date so some countries have huge percentages of peace running pirated Windows that might not be getting updates there are plenty of companies that can't just immediately update 300,000 pcs with a new patch and of course some people just don't get around to updating their computer very often to demonstrate what happens if you are infecting over we're going to purposely put want to cry on this computer now the main thing I want to see is first of all can you do anything about it spoiler alert no but also I just want to see what the process is if you actually aren't affected so I have a few files on this computer right now so for example I have a WordPad document I have an image but keep in mind one a cry will go after pretty much anything that it's on your PC so you can imagine if this is my personal computer with all of my documents all my everything it will pretty much attack whatever it can get its hands on so what I'm going to be doing is actually manually triggering want to cry generally if this is you and you were infected in the wild you wouldn't really have to do anything it would just show up on your computer attack all your files and you wouldn't even know anything was going on in the background but let's find out what happens when you were attacked by wanna cry all right let's give this a try oh wow yep that's doing stuff at the mêlée doing stuff so you see task manager heating up CPU stuff is all over the desktop I see the original files we also see the encrypted versions interesting so if this happens to you you immediately turn your computer off but you can see it's writing a ton of stuff to the disk right now getting up a favorite of CPU and of course your desktop is just littered with all the crap oh it did it all right what is it safe if you need your files you have to run the decrypt software run and follow the instructions hmm do we want to do it well yes yes we do let's see what happens there we go what happened to my computer your important files are encrypted many of your documents photos videos and databases are no longer accessible because they've been encrypted I love it can I recover my files sure we guarantee that you recover all your files safely and easily but you do not have enough time so if I send them $300 worth of Bitcoin it will call back to home and say hey you did it well decrypt all your files that's all totally fine except who knows as they actually want to do that that was quick now of course there weren't a ton of files on this computer but you can see I've gotta try to open up maybe like the file or anything it just brings it it's like a dot win cry file ok so if I try to open it up yeah it's all complete garbage so it's encrypted there's no way I'm doing anything with that thankfully this version of want to cry is mostly been taken care of at this point but there's always going to be another big exploit that will come out of nowhere so please keep your computers up-to-date keep your phones tablets toasters whatever the case is keep it up-to-date anyway let me know what you guys think about wanna cry and all this crazies in the comments below and I will catch you in the next one