WANNACRY: The World's Largest Ransomware Attack (Documentary)

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A small note before we start,

as much as this video is meant to be a

storytelling experience,

I have also intended it to be

educational,

and so, I have coupled the story along

with how some of these attacks and

technologies work.

This is my first documentary style video,

and so I appreciate any and all feedback

in the comments below.

I really hope you enjoy, and hopefully,

learn a few new things.

Right now, a crippling cyberattack has

businesses around the world

on high alert. The ransomware known as

WannaCry-

We want to move on to the other developing

story this morning, the global cyberattack-

The national security agency

developed this software and it's now

being used by criminals

around the world to demand ransom.

Security experts say this is one

of the worst and most

widespread pieces of malware they've

ever seen-

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In May of 2017, a worldwide cyberattack

by the name of WannaCry

shot for WannaCryptor, impacted over 150

countries,

and hit around 230,000 computers

globally.

Needless to say it became known as one

of the biggest ransomware attacks in

history.

Let's start at the very beginning. On the

morning of the 12th of May, 2017,

according to Akamai, the content delivery

network,

this was the timeline. Reportedly the

first case identified originated from a

Southeast Asian ISP which was detected

at 7:44 am UTC.

Over the next hour, there were cases

seen from Latin America,

then the Continental Europe and UK, then

Brazil and Argentinian ISPs until at 12:39 pm

UTC, 74%

of all ISPs in Asia were affected. And by

3:28 pm UTC,

the ransomware had taken hold of 65%

of Latin American ISPs.

WannaCry was spreading and at an

incredible rate.

Prior to this, such a quick and

widespread ransomware was unheard of.

A lot of organizations, unable to recover

their losses,

were forced to permanently shut down.

Some had to put a pause on their

networks and services, and reported huge

losses,

some in millions of dollars. The attack

did not discriminate. Small to

medium-sized businesses,

large enterprises, the private sector, the

public sector,

railways, healthcare, banks, malls,

ministries,

police, energy companies, ISPs, and there

just seemed to be

no end to the victims. Within few hours,

it had spread to over 11 countries,

and by the end of the first day of the

attack, the ransomware had been

encountered in 74 countries

within thousands and thousands of

organizations.

And so it begged the question, how much

damage will this really cause over the

next few days

or weeks or months if no solution

presents itself?

Your service has been temporarily disconnected.

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Ransomware works in a very simple manner.

It is a type of malware most commonly

spread through phishing attacks,

which are essentially emails used to

trick a user into clicking a link that

leads them to a website

where they enter sensitive data, or to

download attachments which if executed

will infect the computer.

Although initially suspected, WannaCry

did not originate from a phishing attack,

but we'll get to that later.

Once a computer is infected,

the ransomware runs an encryption

process, and usually in less than a

minute,

some or all the files depending on what

the ransomware is meant to affect in the

user's computer

is converted from plain text to

ciphertext.

Plain text is readable or comprehensible

data,

and ciphertext is unintelligible

gibberish.

In order to turn this back into plain

text, the user will need what is known as

a decryption key,

which the attacker promises to provide

if the user were to pay the ransom.

What makes ransomware so dreadful is

that once your files have been encrypted,

you can't exactly decrypt it and

retrieve your data.

Well, you can, but with the current

technology we have, to break common

encryption algorithms used in ransomware

attacks

such as the RSA, it would take millions

to billions to trillions of years.

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This is what you'd see if you were to

become infected with the WannaCry

ransomware.

In addition to this intimidating

wallpaper, your documents,

spreadsheets, images, videos,

music, and most everyday productivity and

multimedia files become encrypted,

essentially being held hostage till the

ransom payment has been made.

The Wanna Decryptor 2.0 comes with a set

of instructions

and in 28 different languages for

victims to follow in order to recover

their files.

The attackers demanded for $300 worth of

bitcoin,

and after three days it would be updated to

$600.

If the payment were to be made seven

days after the infection, the files would

be recoverable.

However, despite this, they also go on to

state that they will return the files

for free to "Users who are so poor

that they couldn't pay"

after six months. The method of

payment,

bitcoin.

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The reason the attackers chose bitcoin

was because it is what we know

as a private cryptocurrency. This allows

the holder of the currency to remain

anonymous.

Though the money could be traced to a

cryptocurrency wallet, which is where the

currency itself is stored,

it would be exponentially difficult to

find the owner of the wallet without

extensive forensic analysis.

This is the reason that bitcoin is used

widely in the dark web

to purchase guns, drugs, and other illegal

goods and services that for obvious

reasons,

you would not be able to find on the

surface web.

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The problem with WannaCry and what made it

exponentially more dangerous than your

average ransomware

was its propagating capabilities.

But to understand this fully, we need to

go back in time a little bit

to 2016. In August of 2016, the equation

group, suspected to have ties with the

National Security Agency's tailored

operations unit,

and described by Kaspersky as one of the

most sophisticated cyberattack groups

in the world,

was said to be hacked by a group called

the shadow brokers.

In this hack, disks full of the NSA's

secrets were stolen.

This was bad because the NSA houses what

we know as Nation State Attacks

which are exploits or hacking tools that

are used to carry out a hack for their

home country

against another country. The NSA would

essentially recruit a skilled hacker and

give them a license to hack

which means if they did carry it out, it

wouldn't be illegal

at least in that country, and the hacker

would not be charged.

The danger here is that the Nation State

Tools in itself are usually pretty

effective,

especially considering they are to be

used as weapons against entire states

and countries.

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The NSA is said to have discovered a

multitude of other vulnerabilities in

the Windows OS

as early as 2013, but was speculated to

have developed exploits secretly and

stockpile them,

rather than reporting it to Microsoft or

the InfoSec community,

so that they could weaponize it and

utilize them in their nation state and

other attacks.

The shadow brokers would go on to

auction off some of these tools that

were developed,

but due to skepticism online on whether

the hackers really did have files as

dangerous as they had claimed,

this would essentially go on to become a

catastrophic failure.

We can talk quite a bit about the shadow

brokers. The story is itself worth

examining individually and maybe even on

a separate video,

but let's narrow our focus down to the

leak that made WannaCry possible

which at that point was the fifth leak

by the group and was said to be the most

damaging one yet.

On April 14, 2017, the shadow brokers

would post a tweet that linked to their

Steem blockchain

on a post titled lost in translation.

This leak contained files from the

initial failed auction which they now

decided to release to the public

for free. The description accompanying

the leaked files doesn't really contain

much worth noting.

As always the shadow brokers would use

broken, but still somewhat comprehensible

English.

However, this is widely speculated not to

speak to their proficiency in the

language,

but rather an attempt to mislead

analysts and prevent them from yielding

any results regarding their identity

characterized by how they type.

The link, which has now been taken down,

takes you to an archive filled with a

number of Windows exploits developed by

the NSA.

It did contain many other valuable tools

worth examining,

but the ones relevant to our story and

what made a regular ransomware so

destructive

were the payload, Doublepulsar and the

now infamous exploit used in the

WannaCry attack,

Eternalblue.

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Server Message Block version 1 or SMBv1

is a network communication protocol

which was developed in 1983.

The function of this protocol would be

to allow one Windows computer to

communicate with another

and share files and printers on a local

network.

However, SMB version 1 had a critical

vulnerability

which allowed for what is known as a

Remote Arbitrary Code Execution

in which an attacker would be able to

execute whatever code that they'd like

on their target or victim's computer

over the Internet

usually with malicious intent. The

function of Eternalblue was to take

advantage of this vulnerability.

Essentially, and I'm going to try and strip

it down to simplify it as much as

possible,

when the shadow brokers first leaked the

NSA tools,

hackers took this opportunity to install

Doublepulsar

which is a tool which opens what we

commonly know in security

as a backdoor. Backdoors allows hackers

to create an entry point into the system

or a network of systems and gain easy

access later on.

The initial infection of WannaCry is not

known,

but it is speculated that the attackers

took advantage of the backdoor to

deliver the payload.

The payload in this case is the

ransomware WannaCry.

When a computer is infected with

WannaCry, oddly

it then tries to connect to the

following unregistered domain

which is basically a random string of

numbers and letters.

If it cannot establish a connection to

this domain, then the real damage begins.

It scans for port 445 on the network

which is the port that is used to host

SMB version 1,

and if the port is deemed to be open, it

would then proceed to spread to that

computer.

This is how it propagated so quickly.

Whether the other users in the network

actually downloaded or clicked on

anything malicious,

regardless, they would be infected, and in

seconds all their data would be

encrypted.

So the damage came in two parts, the

ransomware that encrypts the data

and the worm-like component that is used

to spread the ransomware to any

connected,

vulnerable devices in the network as a

result of Eternalblue and Doublepulsar.

The attack only affected Windows systems,

mainly targeting Windows XP,

Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows

10.

However, a month prior to the leak by the

shadow brokers on March 14, 2017,

Microsoft was made aware of this

vulnerability after it was publicly

reported

almost five years after its discovery.

Microsoft then released a critical patch

to fix this vulnerability,

MS17-010.

However, despite the release of the patch,

a significant number of organizations

never updated their systems,

and unfortunately there were still major

organizations running Windows XP

or Server 2003. These devices were at end

of support

which means that even if updates were

out, they would not receive them

and be completely vulnerable to the

exploit.

If you want to know more about the

vulnerability that the Eternalblue

exploited,

it is now logged in the national

vulnerability database

as CVE-2017-0144

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Marcus Hutchins, also known online by his

alias MalwareTech,

was a 23 year old British security

researcher at Kryptos Logic

in LA. After returning from lunch with a

friend on the afternoon of the attack,

he found himself scouring messaging

boards where he came across

news of a ransomware rapidly taking down

systems in the National Health Service

or NHS all over the UK.

Hutchins, who found it odd that the

ransomware was consistently affecting so

many devices,

concluded that the attack was probably a

computer worm and not just

a simple ransomware. He quickly requested

one of his friends to pass him a sample

of the malware

so that he could examine it and reverse

engineer it to analyze exactly how it

worked.

Once he had gotten his hands on the

malware sample,

he had run it using a virtual

environment with fake files

and found out that it was trying to

connect to an unregistered domain,

which we discussed earlier in Chapter 4.

Hutchins would go on to register this

domain for only $10.69,

which unbeknownst to him,

would actually halt the wannacry

infection.

He would later admit in a tweet that

same day that the domain registration

leading to a pause in the rapid

infection

was indeed an accident dubbing Marcus

Hutchins

as the accidental hero.

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To Hutchins, taking control of

unregistered domains was just a part of

his workflow

when it came to stopping botnets and

tracking malware.

This was so that he could get further

insight into how the malware or botnets

were spreading.

For those of you unaware of what a

botnet is, it is essentially a group of

computers that have been hijacked by

malicious actors

or hackers in order to be used in their

attacks to drive

excess network traffic or steal data.

One computer that has been hijacked is

called a bot and a network of them

is called a botnet, however,

since, as we discussed earlier, the attack

only executes if it's unable to reach

the domains that it checks for.

Think of it as a simple if then

statement.

If the infection cannot connect to x

domain, then proceed with the infection.

If it can reach x domain, stop the attack.

And so the malware being able to connect

to the domain was known as the kill

switch,

the big red button that stops the attack

from spreading any further.

But why would the attackers implement a

kill switch at all?

The first theory is that the creators of

WannaCry wanted a way to stop the attack

if it ever got out of hand or had any

unintentional effects.

The second and the most likely theory

proposed by Hutchins and other security

researchers

was that the kill switch was present in

order to prevent researchers from

looking into the behavior of WannaCry

if it was being executed within what is

known in security

as a sandbox. A sandbox is usually a

virtual computer that is used to run

malware.

It is a contained environment with

measures that have been taken to not

infect any important files or spread to

other networks,

much like what I used in Chapter 2 to

demonstrate the WannaCry ransomware.

Researchers use these sandboxes to run

malware and then use tools to determine

the behavior of the attack.

This is what Hutchins did with fake

files as well.

So the intent behind this kill switch

was to destroy the ransomware if it

existed within a sandbox environment,

again, since they didn't want researchers

to be able to analyze exactly how it

worked.

However, since the attackers used a

static domain,

a domain name that did not change for

each infection, instead of using

dynamically generated domain names

like other renditions of this concept

would usually do,

the WannaCry infections around the world

believed that it was being analyzed in a

sandbox environment

and essentially killed itself since

every single infection was trying to reach

one single hard-coded domain, and now

they could after Hutchins had purchased

it and put it online.

If it had been a randomly generated

domain name,

then the infection would only have

removed itself from Hutchins's sandbox

environment

because the domain he registered would

be unique to him and would not

affect anyone else. This

seems to be an amateur mistake. So

amateur in fact, that the researchers

have speculated that maybe the intent of

the attackers

was not monetary gain, but rather a more

political intention

such as to bring shame to the NSA.

However,

to this date, there is nothing that

confirms nor denies the motive

of the WannaCry attack.

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The rapid infection had seemed to stop,

but for Hutchins or MalwareTech and his

team, the nightmare had only just begun.

Less than an hour from when he had

activated the domain, it was under attack.

The motive of the attackers were to use

the Mirai botnet to host a distributed

denial of service attack,

also known as DDoS, to shut down the

domain so that it would be unreachable

once again and all the halted infections

would resume.

A DDoS attack is usually performed to

flood a domain with

junk traffic 'till it can't handle

anymore and is driven offline.

The Mirai botnet that the attackers were

employing was previously used in one of

the largest ever DDoS attacks

and was comprised of hundreds and

thousands of devices.

The haunting realization that they were

the wall between a flood of infections

that was currently being blocked

slowly dawned on Hutchins and the other

researchers working on the case.

They eventually dealt with the issue by

taking the site to a cached version

which was capable of handling a much

higher traffic load than a live site.

Two days after the domain went live, the

data showed that two million infections

had been halted

showing us what the extent of the damage

could have been if it was not for the

discovery of the kill switch.

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Marcus Hutchins's story does not stop here.

He would go on to be named as a

cybercrime hero,

a title which he didn't enjoy as it

would bring to him unwanted attention,

people trying to piece together his

address, media camping outside of his

house,

and in addition to all of this, he was

still under the pressure of the domain

going offline any minute and wreaking

havoc.

However, he was able to get through these

weary days and sleepless nights

only to be thrown back into chaos.

Three months after the WannaCry attack,

in August of 2017,

Marcus Hutchins, after partying in Vegas

for a week and a half

during DEFCON, a hacker convention, was

arrested in the airport by the FBI on

his way back home.

It seemed that Hutchins in his teenage

years had developed a malware named

Kronos

that would steal banking credentials. He

would go on to sell this malware to

multiple individuals with the help of

someone he met online

named Vinny K. Kronos is still an

ongoing threat to banks around the world.

Hutchins initially battled the charges

with a non-guilty plea,

but after a long and exhausting ordeal

that lasted for years,

in April 2019, he took a plea deal that

would essentially dismiss

all but two counts set against him,

conspiracy to defraud the united states

and actively marketing the kronos

malware.

He faced the possibility of a maximum

prison sentence of ten years,

but because of his contribution towards

WannaCry and as the community had

constantly pointed out

his active involvement in defending the

world against cyber attacks,

the judge ruled in his favor. He was then

released

with zero jail time and is now a free

man.

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As stated before, the WannaCry attack

impacted over 150 countries

and approximately 230,000 computers

globally.

Russia was the most severely infected

with over half the affected computers.

India, Ukraine, and Taiwan also suffered

significant disruption.

The most popular victim to emerge out of

the attacks were the UK's National

Health Service

or the NHS. In the NHS, over 70,000

devices such as computers,

MRI scanners, devices used to test blood,

theater equipment, and over 1200 pieces

of diagnostic equipment were affected.

Approximately, the attack cost the NHS

over 92 million euros,

and globally, the cost amounted to

somewhere between four and eight billion

dollars.

You'd think that the attackers who

launched WannaCry would have made a

decent amount considering how many

countries

and devices were affected, however, as of

June 14, 2017,

when the attacks had begun to subside,

they had only made $130,634.77.

Victims were urged not to pay the ransom

since not only did it encourage the

hackers,

but it also did not guarantee the return

of their data due to skepticism of

whether the attackers could actually

place the paid ransom

to the correct victim. This was clearly

evident from the fact that a large

proportion,

almost all of the affected victims who

had paid the ransom

had still not been returned their data.

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Although initially the prime victims of

WannaCry were said to be Windows XP

clients, over 98% of the victims were

actually running unpatched versions of

Windows 7,

and less than 0.1% of the victims

were using Windows XP.

In the case of Russia, they believed

updates did more to break their devices

rather than fix them,

partly due to the fact that a majority

of people use cracked or pirated

versions of Windows

which means they wouldn't have received

the updates which were released by

Microsoft months prior to the attack.

Microsoft eventually released the

updates for systems that were at end of

support

including Windows XP and other older

versions of Windows.

To this day, if the domain that Marcus

Hutchins acquired were to go down,

the millions of infections that it has

at bay would be released,

but possibly ineffective if the

computers had already applied the patch

that microsoft released.

Eternalblue is still in the wild and

variants of WannaCry have since then

surfaced like Uiwix

which did not come with a kill switch

and addressed the bitcoin payment issue

by assigning a new address for each

victim to collect payment

therefore easily allowing to track the

payment back to the victim.

However, since it did not have an

automatic worm-like functionality that

WannaCry exhibited

it did not pose much of a threat. The

impact of WannaCry is still seen today.

Trend Micro's data clearly indicates that

WannaCry was the most detected malware

family in 2020

thanks to its vulnerable nature. And

F-Secure reports that the most seen type

of exploit is against the SMB version 1

vulnerability

using Eternalblue. The fact that

attackers still continue to try and

exploit this

must mean that there are organizations

out there who have not patched against

this vulnerability.

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Four years after the attack, there is

still no confirmed identity of the

creators of the WannaCry.

There have been accusations towards the

Lazarus Group

who has strong links to North Korea.

However,

this is nothing more than hearsay. So

who is to blame for the catastrophic

damage of WannaCry?

Is it the NSHA who should not have

stockpiled exploits without alerting the

necessary entities about the

vulnerabilities?

Is it the shadow brokers who took

advantage of this, stole, and released it

into the wild?

Is it the developers of WannaCry? Or is

it the fault of microsoft who did not

identify this vulnerability

sooner? While all of this might be true

to some extent,

at the end of the day, the actions these

organizations take are largely out of

the control of the public

and business owners who are usually the

victims of the attack.

Regardless of what we claim, the solution

is very simple.

Make sure we follow the guidelines to

have our data secured.

The most crucial of it is to have a

consistent schedule for updating our

devices,

and to obviously not use outdated

operating systems that put

employee and customer data and their

privacy at huge risks.

When it comes to ransomware, the most

crucial form of defense is frequent

backup. The more frequent it is,

the better. Less than 50% of ransomware

payments actually result in the data

being returned to the victims,

and so needless to say, payment should

not be an option

lest your goal is to lose money and your

data as well.

The biggest mistake that organizations

tend to make is refusing to believe that

they would be a target.

According to a study by Cloudwords in

2021,

every 11 seconds a company is hit by

ransomware, and a large proportion of

organizations are small

to medium-sized businesses that never

see it coming as they're often found to

have less than effective security

strategies in place

making them ideal targets for such

attacks.

Digital transformation during the

Coronavirus pandemic has started to move

businesses to the cloud,

and so cyber criminals have now shifted

their focus to the cloud as well

giving them an entirely new attack

surface to work with.

The cost of ransomware is said to top 20

billion dollars by the end of 2021

and that is ransomware alone. By 2025,

cybersecurity ventures estimates that

cybercrime will cost businesses

10.5 trillion dollars annually

which would amount to just 2 trillion

short of China's economy,

the second biggest economy in the world.

We are headed towards bigger and more

destructive attacks than WannaCry,

and our most reliable defense is our

awareness

and our action to better protect

ourselves. Thank you for watching.

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