Wana Decrypt0r (Wanacry Ransomware) - Computerphile 

Officer: How did the hacker escape? Me: I don't know he just ransomware

*aggressively installs updates*

"All software have bugs" um rude, my Hello World program is perfect and has no bugs, how dare you.

Someone hacked the NSA and stole their backdoor exploits. Damn, those dudes must have a seriously large set of balls.

I hope this guy will be in many more videos on this channel. I find the stuff he is talking about so fascinating.

I believe that is the first time someone argued for the forced updates in Windows 10

So the MalwareTech dude that he was talking about, he found the killswitch and then was hailed a hero. He lived in the UK and went to Las Vegas for a vacation and guess what? The FBI arrested him at the airport. It's because in his younger years when he was learning how to hack, he made a malware which he mistakenly sold to someone. The malware was then incorporated with Kronos which led to sensitive bank information to be leaked. He had trials and he wasn't allowed to leave the U.S. nor, was he allowed to legally work there for 18 months. He finally gave up and accepted his charges. On the day of his sentencing, the Judge let him go as he had done the world a huge favor by finding the killswitch and disabling WanaCry ransomware. A very interesting documentary, indeed! {also, when he was arrested, he was left on bail on a bond of $30k, his story got out in his country and the very second day, the community had paid it off completely!}

"If you're running XP, the first think you should do is turn off your machine because you have no business running XP" lol

I think failure to report a vulnerability like this should be a crime, but we all know NSA is outside of the law

Paid $300 to get my computer decrypted so I could watch this video

The problem with Microsofts update policy is they don't discern between security, driver and feature updates. Security updates should be installed instantly. Driver updates can break whole system. Nvidia.seems very prone to this. Feature Updates are almost guaranteed to introduce new bugs.

How is it that my mac takes hours to encrypt my drive/files, but this thing does it in seconds?

You can thank the NSA for this hack.

*NSA* ~ _We put surveillance above our countries safety._

That 1940's Ford Analogy was beautiful

Fortunately for me, my computer already has so many viruses on it theres no room for any more!

I expected to find out about the actual virus. He kinda only summed up the news from this weekend. Does this virus actually encrypt your files? How can you get rid of it? (I am not affected)

it's a vulnerability in SMB1 (Super Mario Brothers)

Dr. Pound is my favorite presenter you feature on this channel. He's very well spoken and clear in his explanations. I also enjoy his drawings that illustrate what he is talking about.

no link to the exe in the video description??? wtf, unsubbed

If you're smart enough to figure out how to pay the ransom you're probably not running XP

6:52 As a "lone wolf" SysAdmin, this kept me up at night back in 2017...honestly pretty terrifying, the thought of ransomware worm ripping through the corporate LAN you manage! Luckily I was able to react quickly enough and get everything patched.

14:24 "we're doing this to fu.... counter terrorism"

I love the new content you guys are making, this channel is quickly becoming my favorite! Keep up the good work guys!

> Yeah, and win 10 is patching non functional drivers over my existing working one ={

A "Do not try this at home" on Computerphile. That's a first... right?

I have always been fascinated by the engineering that goes into crafting these malwares. Just mind blowing details

This guy is such a great host. Videos about very intriguing topics and explains everything very well

It always scares me when someone says, "I'm from the government. I'm here to help. Trust me."

I love the shadow brokers. I think it's far more ethical to tell everyone about the existence of these exploits and the fact that a so called "Security" agency knew about them and kept them a secret arrogantly thinking that nobody would know. Far more than someone who knows about an exploit and doesn't tell anybody so that everybody is vulnerable. What if some third party found the exploit and used it without telling anybody, far more problems could arise as microsoft wouldn't have put out a patch.

Dr. Pound's videos are the highlight of this channel for me. Great work.

Yesterday i was thinking about that ransomware could be a great topic for computerphile and when i woke up today i found this video. I was pleasently surprised.Thanks computerphile

it's amusing how the NSA is now whining about how microsoft should have put in a legitimate backdoor for them to use so they wouldn't have to stockpile exploits except microsoft has every right to say "you want us to make you a back door so you can get hacked and lose that too?"

I'm using the Ransomware splash screen as my wallpaper right now.

Is the encryption key for these viruses always the same? Does the encryption ever get broken?

I had to google what a “sandbox” or “virtual machine” was (to examine how code is being executed in a protected environment) so I really don’t know why I watch some of this stuff but holy hell I learn a lot. Thanks!

I can't wait for someone to exploit a update server, everyone will be so confused.

You CAN turn off the updates for windows 10. Juest not the clasic way. Some service tweaks and registry tweaks can do anything on windows.

Love the Dr Pound videos, never fails to be interesting!

I love Dr. Pound's discussions :)

8:58 "volkswagon emission situation", lol, this is gold.

I want Dr. Pound to teach me Computer Science. I wish I had him when I was in college

I was waiting for your video since Saturday! :)

I can't believe I haven't found this channel before. I learnt about all of this type of malware but I never saw one in action.

Organizations with legacy software and legacy OS dependencies should isolate offline computers from machines that can access the web. That's information security 101.

Dose it actually give your files back if you pay?

Thanks for getting this one out guys, interesting as ever!

love it! awesome job with the interview mate :)

*UPDATES SYSTEM AGRESSIVELY*

I've switched all my computers to linux. I finished the last one up just a week before this came out. This sort of thing is one of the main motivating factors. Not that viruses don't exist for the platform, or that hackers wont still hack but at least there isn't any major bureaucracy holding up patches.

This gent is doing things for me with his intelligence and simple explanations. Aside that - this channel is fantastic. Thank you.

I could listen to this guy talk all day

12:36 Oh yeah! To minimize this problem, I configured our network so that the Win XP machine can see the scanner, but it cannot connect to the Internet at all. Also, we only turn it on when we need to use the scanner.

thing is windows updates tend to break things much more frequently than attacks from the vulnerabilities they patch

I like your analogies very much.

I love the cubes in the background

I always thought it was called "WanaCry" since it made you wanna cry.

"You've got no business running xp" tell that to ATM manufacturers running SP4.

I would love for this man to be my professor. So personable and knowledgeable.

On the one hand Windows only allowing brief delays in updating is useful for security purposes to keep the system up to date. On the other hand they've made the entire update system a magic black box so that when it breaks it's near impossible to fix. One of my systems keeps just saying "Updates weren't installed, click here to fix" and clicking on the prompt just goes to the setting to configure when to do updates (which aren't working).

could my windows 98 be affected wannaCry? or is it indeed 9,8 times as secure as windows 10 by now?

One should be able to turn off annoying UI updates and leave only important security ones

This guy's really interesting and eloquent would love to see more videos with him in

I only watch Computerphile videos when this guy is doing the videos

11:37 Jokes on you! I'm running Windows ME...

This is why the backdoor should be off limits...unless it's consensual.

Great video as always guys

You can turn off Windows 10 updates by stopping the service from running, but there is no "user" option to switch it off. Great video guys, well explained.

*laughs in linux*

The only interesting thing about this whole situation is the NSA angle. The rest of this is so over-hyped in the media, it's just another day at the office as far as I'm concerned.

Dr Pound it's always a good information and content =D I'm italian and I appreciate it! Thanks Computerphile

love the way you teach dude

"No one in Nottingham as far as we know has got it" sounds like he's talking about a way too familiar virus

My girlfriend's dad (not an enthusiast or especially computer savvy) has written down the number of an update which he needs to prevent windows from installing so that he can run Battlefield Vietnam, which he paid for, and a computer that he paid for running an operating system that he paid for. And hence, the case against forced updates.

Excellent video. :) Describes the problem calmly, without all the media hype. I will link anyone with questions about it to this video.

I like how descriptive names in programming are.. WannaCry for a ransomware, RockYou, HashCat, patches etc. Pulling paralels between real life things and digital code bits.

when win10 turns off when I'm 3d printing half way through a print or using CCTV is not very helpful is it I could be using my pc for anything and I can't stop it restarting and sitting on the login screen

Ad-blocker will keep me safe.

i could watch this guy all day.very entertaining bloke...

These are the lessons to learn for everybody (any order): - Do your Updates! Always! - Have a backup, do them often, and keep one away from your PC - don't click mail attachments until you are very very very sure them being legit - Forget about antivirus snakeoil rubbish, none of them helps when its critical

*trojan virus starts spreading in China* China 3 years later: “oh yeah check this out”

To anyone saying "Why not block the Bitcoin address": There is no one "owning" Bitcoin who can define rules for it. No one can stop what Bitcoin has become nor can they change the Bitcoin protocol. It's simply impossible to do such thing, when everything is run P2P and with no owner. Look at it like torrents. "The owners of torrenting" (inventors) cannot simply say "This torrent cannot be downloaded anymore", because they have no authority.

In addition to what has been said about manually configuring scheduled tasks or group policies to disable Win10 updates, it's also possible to request a special corporate version of it. There's some fringe cases, where the multi-gigabyte updates over the network are not tenable, or when the computer absolutely cannot suffer unforeseen restarts / performance degradations. There was one case with African wild life reservation posts and their satellite data caps..

Great info. And yes, you can turn off auto updates on W10. Which is good for some scenarios.

National Insecurity Agency

Have you considered changing your name to Dr. Hashtag?

Great insight into WCry.

You can postpone updates in Windows 10, you can tick a box saying you're on a metered connection and it won't update as aggressively.

Thanks NSA.

Hey mike, I know you aren't reading this but thank you so much for being a breath of fresh air when defending Microsoft (the company I do tech support for). We get calls daily from customers who still in 2020 have not upgraded to Windows 10 and blame us for getting a virus on their machine running Windows 7. Thank you Michael Pound!!!

(Cross posted question) Is WannaCry able to infect systems that don’t have the Microsoft vulnerability once it is present on the infected system's network? Or is it confined only to systems that have the vulnerability?

thanks for sharing. very well developed thought and easy to understand explanation.

5:36 but like you said Port 445 should not be open on your WAN interface but it still spread to other networks. This just proves that big router companies had also been exploited by the NSA, don't you think? Also the NSA does not only engage in counter terrorism. They engage in every way to influence world politics to the benefit of their country.

How about just not use Windows?

Can you please make a video on how exactly the EternalBlue exploit and the DoublePulsar exploit worked? From what I understand it's a buffer overflow, but I'd love to see a detailed analysis on how the actual exploit works, It'd be very interesting and you always explain everything perfectly! Thanks!

Dr Pound, you mentioned at the end that people may not update because of the necessity of resets. Is this actually a necessity? It seems to me that more people would update regularly if it didn't affect their usage. If it is a necessity, why? I only ask because I am a Uni student, and I know that if I'm writing an essay a few hours before a deadline (I know I shouldn't, but who doesn't?), then I will not install a patch that requires a restart. I then forget about it until I'm reminded maybe a week later

So funny here from my linux desktop...

I just don't get these guys that don't want updates ever because of privacy. You are far more likely to get hacked without updates. Your files are more vulnerable to random people online rather than a big organization who is bound to get caught selling information. It is in Microsoft's best interest to keep their users' info safe rather than risk getting a huge shitstorm all over them for the bad practices they might use to make a quick buck.

Dr. Mike Pound is the man! I will always click on a mike pound video.

The volkswagen analogy is quite apropos!