Researchers find way to unlock WannaCry without ransom

French researchers have found out a way for you to unlock your windows files affected by the WannaCry ransomware without paying the ransom to these cyber terrorists.

WannaCry ransomware took the world by surprise last Friday. And till now it has infected over 3,00,000 computers in 150 nations. Also, threatening the users to lock them out if a ransom of $300 to $600 is not paid within a week of infection.

Unlock WannaCry without paying the ransom

A few security researchers around the world have collaborated together and developed a workaround to unlock the encryption key for the users affected. But, these workarounds work only in a few conditions, which are -

• If the computers had not been rebooted since becoming infected.
• If victims apply the fix before WannaCry has carried out its threat to lock their files permanently.

Europol in a tweet said that. Their Cyber Crime team has tested out this new tool. And found it worked in some circumstances.

The team which developed this tool included Adrien Guinet a security expert, Matthieu Suiche an internationally known hacker, and Benjamin Delpy who helped in his spare time, outside his day job at the Banque de France.

We knew we must go fast because, as time passes, there is less chance to recover

Benjamin Delpy

The tool released to decrypt the WannaCry ransomware at 6 am Paris time on Friday. This free tool for decrypting the ransomware without paying the ransom is being called by Deply wanakiwi. We also have reviewed a tool to avoid any ransomware, you can read about it here.

WanaKiwi the free and only tool to decrypt WannaCry

Matthieu Suiche also published a blog specifying the technical details about the tool that the team has built. Wanakiwi has been tested out and shown to work on the Windows 7 and earlier operating systems. Also, a fix is being developed hastily to make the tool work on Windows 2008 and Vista.

Deply also added in his statement that so far Indian, and European country banking, energy and government intelligence agencies have contacted him for the fix.

The idea in this tool involves extracting the keys to the WannaCry encryption codes using prime numbers. Ignoring trying to break the endless string of digits behind the software's full encryption key.

This is not a perfect solution. But this is so far the only workable solution to help enterprises to recover their files if they have been infected and have no back-ups. Which allow users to restore data without paying black-mailers.

Matthieu Suiche

As of now, only $94,000 have been paid to these cyber terrorists, which is only 309 transactions. which means just under one in 1,000 of the estimated victims have paid the ransom.