French based researcher suggests method for WannaCry victims to decrypt data without paying ransom

If you’re one of the people that have been affected by the recent outbreak of the WannaCry worm, there may be some hope for you yet – something that doesn’t involve you dropping up to $600 to the people who hijacked your desktop. French researcher Adrien Guinet has put together a workaround that can free your Windows XP computer of the worm, if the planets happen to align for you and the fix is compatible with your computer.

I got to finish the full decryption process, but I confirm that, in this case, the private key can recovered on an XP system #wannacry!! pic.twitter.com/QiB3Q1NYpS

— Adrien Guinet (@adriengnt) May 18, 2017

This isn’t a guaranteed fix for anyone. If the fix is going to work for you, not only is it important that you haven’t restarted your computer since your computer was infected (which would be most people’s first reaction) but there are a few things under the hood that you just need to get lucky with. While this isn’t the end-all be-all fix for this worm, it’s some small degree of hope for the hundreds of thousands of people who’ve had their computers robbed from them by the lockdown that WannaCry imposes.

Microsoft has recently put out a fix for Azure users who have experienced the bug, which – along with Guinet’s work – are chipping away at the WannaCry epidemic. We’ll update you as soon as any more fixes come out, but in the meantime you can get Guinet’s fix on its GitHub page – as well as pore through the source code, if you want to try and iterate on it.

Further reading: Microsoft, WannaCry, WannaCrypt, Windows XP