As you might have heard, there is a particularly nasty piece of malware running rampant in the form of WannaCry, which is basically a ransomware that encrypts the data on your PC when it infects it, and then the hackers will demand money from you in order to decrypt it and give you back your data.
Now getting infected might feel like the end of the world, but it seems that there is now a tool that can apparently decrypt PCs infected by WannaCry for free. Dubbed wanakiwi, this is apparently a tool developed and based on WannaKey, which was a previously released tool that also helped decrypt PCs, although there were slightly more steps involved.
Matt Suiche who is the co-founder of security firm Comae Technologies helped to develop the tool which will work on Windows XP, Windows 7, and Windows 2003 computers. However it is also expected to work on other versions such as Vista, Server 2008, and 2008 R2. As for computers that run x64 CPUs, it seems that the tool has yet to be extensively tested on those platforms, so there’s no guarantee that it will work.
Note that wanakiwi isn’t a 100% guaranteed tool either. For example computers that have been restarted will no longer work, and if the memory location on computers that stores the key has been overwritten, wanakiwi will not work either, however we guess at the very least there will be an option out there for users.
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