Ooops, your files have been encrypted!

The British National Health Service used it to ask for more funding, the Russians used holy water, and the Americans (tried) to use Windows firewall: everyone had their own method of dealing with the WannaCry virus. The virus swept through computers across the world in the middle of May when thousands of people booted up their PCs only to be greeted with the screen shown below. The cocky confidence of the hackers responsible was evident as victims were mocked for having their files encrypted, a humiliation further accentuated by a smug “Ooops.”

An estimated total of 200,000 computers were affected worldwide. The worst hit country was Russia where public services, phone operators, and government organizations grinded to a halt without access to their files. The British also suffered greatly, especially their public health service which had to cancel appointments and surgeries as they lost access to the files of multiple patients. University students in China were also impacted, losing access to their final projects. But while students at Deerfield were inundated with end of year projects and papers, we could rest assured that the WannaCry malware had yet to spread to the Macintosh operating system. The virus also did not restrict itself to just computers: MRI scanners, blood storage refrigerators and theatre equipment were all affected. Our reliance on digital data managing creates an issue whereby if we lose access to these files, our society literally enters a state of limbo.

The rapidity and severity of the Ransomware attack exposed the weakness in global cybersecurity. For such viruses, we have no vaccine or golden bullet antibiotic. The accidental nature by which this attack was stopped is further testament to our vulnerability. A young computer programmer named Marcus Hutchins had stumbled upon a “kill switch” while analyzing the code of the virus. Marcus decided to register a web address that the virus was trying to connect to and inadvertently caused the virus to stop spreading itself. The deluge was plugged, but thousands of files were still encrypted, at the mercy of these criminals.

The WannaCry virus first used the EternalBlue infection vector to gain access to the computer network. Ironically this was created by the National Security Agency. Then the virus used a backdoor tool to get past firewalls and gain access to the computer’s files. The WannaCry encryption program actually encrypted a variety of data files to block access to them. The program also displayed the ransom picture above. This instructed people to pay in Bitcoin, a virtual untraceable cryptocurrency, to decrypt their files. A timer on the side of the screen cap counted down the seconds until the files would be permanently encrypted.

While we can breathe a sigh of relief that the WannaCry attack has ended, we should still be wary of this virus that has set a precedent for further cyberattacks.