Yes, this virus shouted to the whole world on May 12 very loudly. Wanna Cry was not the virus that quietly and quietly spreads around the world from computer to computer, with which antiviruses are gradually trained to work and which eventually becomes one of the people recognized in the table of recognizable viruses.
No, it's much more complicated here. The virus literally in a few hours spread throughout the world. Russia and China were particularly affected, for some time Australia was holding on, but she also landed in this “pit”.
It came to speeches by leading politicians of the world. A loud statement was also made by one of the Microsoft executives who directly accused the US intelligence services of irresponsible behavior. The fact is that, it turns out, the American FBI over the past few years has been investigating the Windows system for all sorts of flaws and loopholes. For their own purposes, of course. And the loopholes were found - not the gods work at Microsoft either, they are also prone to mistakes.
The only problem is that somehow the investigations of the US detectives suddenly became known to the entire computer world, or rather to those who found the opportunity to profit from them.
How is it distributed
In fact, the method of spreading the Wanna Cry virus is traditional:
- you receive a letter in the mail;
- you open it (and how many have already been spoken and negotiated - in no case do not open letters from unfamiliar recipients);
- the virus starts and does its dirty work.
Wannacry can also run through unfamiliar exe- or js-files, infection may also occur through a graphic file (and that may be more tempting than a sexy picture).
There are cases when the infection occurred simply because the computer was online. It does not bypass its attention and cloud technologies - its preachers were completely confounded, they are not so protected as it is constantly told to us. In general, when you first look at the current situation - the edge, from which there is no way out, there is a wall in front, and nowhere to go.
And further, through a hole in Windows, with the XP versions (the outdated exchange protocol of this system is SMB1) and 7, and wanna cry starts to act, it gets to the core of the operating system.
At first it seemed that only the system drive “C:” became the object of attention of the virus. But as the situation developed, it turned out that the virus had spread to removable disks, which is unexpected - on Windows 10. I don’t have to talk about flash drives, they just “burn like candles”.
How manifest
The virus cryptalker wanna cry, which infected the PC, manifests itself as follows:
First, the attacked file gets a new extension, “.wncry”.
Secondly, the first eight characters in the file name are supplemented with the string “wanacry!”.
Thirdly, and most importantly, the virus encrypts the contents of the file, and in such a way that it is not possible to cure it, at least in a reasonable amount of time. And it was enough to create problems in the work of doctors in the UK, the police in Russia, managers of electronic plants in China.
Fourthly, and this is simply trivial and passed more than one hundred times by the “boys” from programming - they require, in order to recover files, from 300 to 500 dollars that need to be transferred using BitCoin. They say that 100 people did it, after all, a drop in the ocean relative to the total mass requiring treatment, probably, the evil intentioned people counted on much more.
All that needs to be done, the virus tells you in a separate window under the sonorous title “Ooops, your files have been encrypted!”. Moreover, these pseudo-developers took care of the localization service: the text for the Germans was in German, for the New Zealanders in English, while the Russians read it in Russian. Already only by constructing phrases, experienced linguists can determine where these cyber gangs come from.
To solve the problem, how to restore information Kaspersky, or especially any of the well-known cryptographers will not work. Getting rid of the virus by simply deleting the file also does not work.
What to do in the first moments
As soon as a suspicion arose that wannacry, through Brisbane and Calcutta, came to you on Lizyukov Street, before the treatment itself, do the following:
- Disable all external storage media and in no case use them anywhere, at least until a guaranteed recovery appears, you need to forget about them.
- Close access to folders that you have synchronized with analogs in the cloud.
- Of course - delete all mail, even if necessary, for a while you will have to sit on the phone.
- Try to check all the same antivirus. The fact is that wannacry has several versions. So, some of them, however, the first, it turns out, are taken Spy Hunter Anti-Malware Tool, Malwarebytes Anti-malware and StopZilla.
What to do always until pecked
And again, think about the operations that the systems analyst is constantly talking about:
- Constantly keep up with the latest updates of the used software, the system, first of all, and install it on your laptop. By the way, Microsoft very quickly proposed a method for how to treat wanna cry - download and install the latest version of Windows 10 with prompt changes. Even if there is no detailed description of the wanna cry virus, it’s rather to antivirus developers, not yet clear how to decrypt the files, but in Palo Alto they very quickly implemented patches in their software products.
- Constantly back up your most important information. It should be the rule in this way to fight viruses - every Tuesday and Friday, at exactly 3:00 pm, all current work is stopped and backups are made. If you don’t make such a rule, then tomorrow you’ll have to cry about the lost 100 million profits and think about how to remove the virus, not about wanna cry, but about the Market Applause or something else.
- If you do not work on the network, then disconnect from it, because, to be honest, we are constantly connected to Skype, to “contacts”, simply out of habit, and suddenly someone will call. Do not forget to cancel the activation of wireless Wi-Fi.
Yes, wanna cry didn’t do anything new –– the same desire for money, the same desire to become famous (although the fame doesn’t go any farther than the “kitchen”), the same game of carelessness and torn in the world, from the FBI and the US State Department to poorly organized work with backup and information protection.