NHS hit by ransomware

Been watching this on Twitter this evening and have been intrigued with this so called sophistic attack, lets delve deeper.

The attack is actually using the EternalBlue vulnerability (patched at beginning of March) released over the Easter Weekend among many other vulnerabilities called zero days (as Microsoft had not been made aware of them up to this point) and looked like they had been created by Equation Group for the NSA.  Shadow Brokers managed to obtain these vulnerabilities, possibly by hacking the NSA and then tried to sell them to the highest bidder after originally trying to sell them off for around $1M but paid for in bitcoins, this carried on dropping and dropping till they eventually released the 300mb file on the Easter Weekend.

On closer inspection the exploit ETERNALBLUE works by remotely connecting via SMB & NBT (Windows XP to Windows 2012) and basically hits any windows machine older than Windows 10, hense bring on the ransomware using this exploit plus some FUZZBUNCH exploits and you have WannaCry or WCry 2.0 .

Its been written in C++ and the code is easily viewable as no attempt has been made to hide the code and encrypts the files and adds a .WNCRY extension before asking for a $300-$600 bitcoin ransom.

So does that mean Im vulnerable? providing you have applied all Microsoft security patches including MS17-010 released in March then no you should be safe. also stopping the SMB V1 service which this ransomware/malware uses.

So far it looks like if you can crash Wcrypt it will reset, however if it does infect your machine it will also add the DOUBLEPULSAR backdoor.  Also if www.iuqerfsodp9ifjaposdfjhgosurijfaewrwergwea.com is up the virus exits instead of infecting the host.

This also only affect Microsoft products so linux users you are safe, but again dont open those attachments you were not expecting, use a good anti virus and back up your files on a external device as well as saving very important work to usb sticks.

So far over 70k machines have been infected and thats not just NHS machines; FedEx, Telefonica, Shaheen Airlines are to name a few.

Have these pesky kids got away with it? well the bitcoins can be traced to an extent so they will need to clean the coins by passing them through bitcoin launderers, other people, a few anonymous throwaway bitcoin accounts before finally transfering the money into their own account for each $300 I can see them being left with $100 per ransom or less as this will have to go on and on for months.  Already the ransonware has been dissected and those who know their stuff in bitcoins have already started to track the bitcoins about.

nb: binary blob in pe crypted with password "WNcry@20l7"