WanaFork

One of the most recent and arguably interesting developments following the whole WannaCry fiasco is the appearance of a tool developed by a French security researcher called Wannakey that may be able to help Windows XP users recover their data with zero cost.

Let's say that you're one of the unlucky XP users that had their data taken hostage by ransomware variously known as WannaCry, WanaCryptor, and WannaCrypt, and you've been ultimately lucky enough and managed to recover your data, which is still encrypted. Unfortunately, at the time this piece was written, it's not entirely understood how this type of ransomware actually works. What do you do?

Well, here's an idea: you could use WanaFork and try to decrypt it. But, before you do, there are a few things you should be aware of. First of all, the utility does not work on Windows XP (at least for the time being).

Secondly, as the developer mentions on the utility's official GitHub repository, this is a tool mainly intended for security researchers studying the encryption and decryption processes behind the infamous WannaCry ransomware.

He also mentions that success cannot be entirely guaranteed, that it should not be used to recover critical files, and that it was worth publishing it in order to help people further understand how this type of ransomware works. You've been warned!

The whole process should be quite straightforward, at least in theory. Just download the utility and run it using the Command Prompt (it might help if you run the CMD with full administrative rights). You will be able to see that there are four default commands.

"-g" helps you generate the RSA key pair and export the blobs, "-e" and "-d" are used for encrypting and decrypting the file, respectively the archive (both commands require the 00000000.pky parameter), and lastly, "-i" shows a set of information about the archive.

If you're successful at decrypting and recovering your data and if you're passionate about security, you might want to consider using your knowledge towards helping the developer or anyone else fighting towards creating better and more user-friendly tools of this sort.