Cybersecurity

There's an easy fix for WannaCry, if you haven't rebooted yet

There's a glimmer of hope for a specific subset of victims in the WannaCry hack. Security researchers have released a fix that gets rid of the ransomware and restores a device's files, though it only works on Windows XP to Windows 7, and only on computers that have not been rebooted since the infectio

The fix is called wanakiwi and it comes from security researcher Benjamin Delpy. The program scours a computer's memory for prime numbers, the foundation of encryption, and then uses those to generate unlock keys for the encrypted files. (Restarting the computer could erase these prime numbers.) This ingenious little tool is based on Adrien Guinet's wannakey, which was designed to recover Windows XP keys.