- Hey, guys, this is Austin,
and this is something that you never want to see.
So, you've 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're 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 it can get its hands on.
But what is Ransomware?
So this actually isn't a new thing.
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 holds 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 it will find things like pictures, video, music,
documents, pretty much anything it can get its hands on
and start encrypting it.
And once these files are encrypted,
and it doesn't take long,
they are 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.
Ransomware like this has been around for a few years now,
but what's different is that there's a new,
much more dangerous version of it around: WannaCry.
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.
Eternal 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 WannaCry,
but of course, there are lots, and lots,
and lots of computers that are not fully up-to-date.
Some countries have huge percentages of PCs
that are 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 infected, however,
we're going to purposely put WannaCry on this computer.
Now, the main thing I wanna see is, first of all,
can you do anything about it.
Spoiler alert: No.
But also, I just wanna see what the process is
if you actually are infected.
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, WannaCry'll go after pretty much anything
that is on your PC.
So you can imagine, if this was 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 WannaCry.
Generally, if this was you
and you were infected in the wild,
you would 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 are attacked by WannaCry.
Alright, let's give this a try.
Oh, wow, yep.
That's doing stuff.
That's immediately doing stuff.
So you see Task Manager eating up CPU,
stuff is all over the desktop.
I see the original files
but also see the encrypted versions.
So if this happens to you,
you would immediately turn your computer off.
But you can see it's writing a ton of stuff
to the disk right now.
Eating up a fair bit of CPU, and of course,
your desktop is just littered with all the crap.
Oh! (laughing incredulously)
It did it.
Alright, what does this say?
If you need your files,
you have to run the decrypt software.
Run and follow the instructions.
(laughing)
Hmm, do you wanna do it?
Well, yes, yes we do.
Let's see what happens.
Oh, 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 have been encrypted.
(laughs) I love it.
Can I recover my files?
Sure, we guarantee that you will 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.
We'll decrypt all your files and it's all totally fine.
Except who knows if they actually wanna do that.
That was quick.
Now of course, there weren't a ton of files
on this computer, but you can see,
I'm gonna try to open up maybe like a file or anything.
It just brings it...
It's like a .WinCry file?
Okay, so I'm gonna 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 WannaCry
has 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 WannaCry
and all of this craziness in the comments below,
and I will catch you in the next one.