Officer: How did the hacker escape? Me: I don't know he just ransomware

*aggressively installs updates*

"All software have bugs" um rude, my Hello World program is perfect and has no bugs, how dare you.

Someone hacked the NSA and stole their backdoor exploits. Damn, those dudes must have a seriously large set of balls.

I believe that is the first time someone argued for the forced updates in Windows 10

I hope this guy will be in many more videos on this channel. I find the stuff he is talking about so fascinating.

So the MalwareTech dude that he was talking about, he found the killswitch and then was hailed a hero. He lived in the UK and went to Las Vegas for a vacation and guess what? The FBI arrested him at the airport. It's because in his younger years when he was learning how to hack, he made a malware which he mistakenly sold to someone. The malware was then incorporated with Kronos which led to sensitive bank information to be leaked. He had trials and he wasn't allowed to leave the U.S. nor, was he allowed to legally work there for 18 months. He finally gave up and accepted his charges. On the day of his sentencing, the Judge let him go as he had done the world a huge favor by finding the killswitch and disabling WanaCry ransomware. A very interesting documentary, indeed! {also, when he was arrested, he was left on bail on a bond of $30k, his story got out in his country and the very second day, the community had paid it off completely!}

"If you're running XP, the first think you should do is turn off your machine because you have no business running XP" lol

Paid $300 to get my computer decrypted so I could watch this video

The problem with Microsofts update policy is they don't discern between security, driver and feature updates. Security updates should be installed instantly. Driver updates can break whole system. Nvidia.seems very prone to this. Feature Updates are almost guaranteed to introduce new bugs.

I think failure to report a vulnerability like this should be a crime, but we all know NSA is outside of the law

Dr. Pound is my favorite presenter you feature on this channel. He's very well spoken and clear in his explanations. I also enjoy his drawings that illustrate what he is talking about.

You can thank the NSA for this hack.

How is it that my mac takes hours to encrypt my drive/files, but this thing does it in seconds?

I love the new content you guys are making, this channel is quickly becoming my favorite! Keep up the good work guys!

I have always been fascinated by the engineering that goes into crafting these malwares. Just mind blowing details

*NSA* ~ _We put surveillance above our countries safety._

6:52 As a "lone wolf" SysAdmin, this kept me up at night back in 2017...honestly pretty terrifying, the thought of ransomware worm ripping through the corporate LAN you manage! Luckily I was able to react quickly enough and get everything patched.

Dr. Pound's videos are the highlight of this channel for me. Great work.

This guy is such a great host. Videos about very intriguing topics and explains everything very well

it's a vulnerability in SMB1 (Super Mario Brothers)

That 1940's Ford Analogy was beautiful

Yesterday i was thinking about that ransomware could be a great topic for computerphile and when i woke up today i found this video. I was pleasently surprised.Thanks computerphile

Fortunately for me, my computer already has so many viruses on it theres no room for any more!

14:24 "we're doing this to fu.... counter terrorism"

If you're smart enough to figure out how to pay the ransom you're probably not running XP

I had to google what a “sandbox” or “virtual machine” was (to examine how code is being executed in a protected environment) so I really don’t know why I watch some of this stuff but holy hell I learn a lot. Thanks!

Love the Dr Pound videos, never fails to be interesting!

I've switched all my computers to linux. I finished the last one up just a week before this came out. This sort of thing is one of the main motivating factors. Not that viruses don't exist for the platform, or that hackers wont still hack but at least there isn't any major bureaucracy holding up patches.

I love the shadow brokers. I think it's far more ethical to tell everyone about the existence of these exploits and the fact that a so called "Security" agency knew about them and kept them a secret arrogantly thinking that nobody would know. Far more than someone who knows about an exploit and doesn't tell anybody so that everybody is vulnerable. What if some third party found the exploit and used it without telling anybody, far more problems could arise as microsoft wouldn't have put out a patch.

This gent is doing things for me with his intelligence and simple explanations. Aside that - this channel is fantastic. Thank you.

I was waiting for your video since Saturday! :)

12:36 Oh yeah! To minimize this problem, I configured our network so that the Win XP machine can see the scanner, but it cannot connect to the Internet at all. Also, we only turn it on when we need to use the scanner.

it's amusing how the NSA is now whining about how microsoft should have put in a legitimate backdoor for them to use so they wouldn't have to stockpile exploits except microsoft has every right to say "you want us to make you a back door so you can get hacked and lose that too?"

I love Dr. Pound's discussions :)

love it! awesome job with the interview mate :)

8:58 "volkswagon emission situation", lol, this is gold.

You CAN turn off the updates for windows 10. Juest not the clasic way. Some service tweaks and registry tweaks can do anything on windows.

Dr Pound it's always a good information and content =D I'm italian and I appreciate it! Thanks Computerphile

Thanks for getting this one out guys, interesting as ever!

Organizations with legacy software and legacy OS dependencies should isolate offline computers from machines that can access the web. That's information security 101.

I want Dr. Pound to teach me Computer Science. I wish I had him when I was in college

love the way you teach dude

You can turn off Windows 10 updates by stopping the service from running, but there is no "user" option to switch it off. Great video guys, well explained.

It always scares me when someone says, "I'm from the government. I'm here to help. Trust me."

no link to the exe in the video description??? wtf, unsubbed

Excellent video. :) Describes the problem calmly, without all the media hype. I will link anyone with questions about it to this video.

Great video as always guys

A "Do not try this at home" on Computerphile. That's a first... right?

I'm using the Ransomware splash screen as my wallpaper right now.

I would love for this man to be my professor. So personable and knowledgeable.

I like your analogies very much.

> Yeah, and win 10 is patching non functional drivers over my existing working one ={

thing is windows updates tend to break things much more frequently than attacks from the vulnerabilities they patch

I can't believe I haven't found this channel before. I learnt about all of this type of malware but I never saw one in action.

Great insight into WCry.

To anyone saying "Why not block the Bitcoin address": There is no one "owning" Bitcoin who can define rules for it. No one can stop what Bitcoin has become nor can they change the Bitcoin protocol. It's simply impossible to do such thing, when everything is run P2P and with no owner. Look at it like torrents. "The owners of torrenting" (inventors) cannot simply say "This torrent cannot be downloaded anymore", because they have no authority.

The only interesting thing about this whole situation is the NSA angle. The rest of this is so over-hyped in the media, it's just another day at the office as far as I'm concerned.

In addition to what has been said about manually configuring scheduled tasks or group policies to disable Win10 updates, it's also possible to request a special corporate version of it. There's some fringe cases, where the multi-gigabyte updates over the network are not tenable, or when the computer absolutely cannot suffer unforeseen restarts / performance degradations. There was one case with African wild life reservation posts and their satellite data caps..

I could listen to this guy talk all day

"You've got no business running xp" tell that to ATM manufacturers running SP4.

Thanks NSA.

This guy's really interesting and eloquent would love to see more videos with him in

Great info. And yes, you can turn off auto updates on W10. Which is good for some scenarios.

*laughs in linux*

I can't wait for someone to exploit a update server, everyone will be so confused.

I like how descriptive names in programming are.. WannaCry for a ransomware, RockYou, HashCat, patches etc. Pulling paralels between real life things and digital code bits.

superb explanation!

Hey mike, I know you aren't reading this but thank you so much for being a breath of fresh air when defending Microsoft (the company I do tech support for). We get calls daily from customers who still in 2020 have not upgraded to Windows 10 and blame us for getting a virus on their machine running Windows 7. Thank you Michael Pound!!!

11:37 Jokes on you! I'm running Windows ME...

thanks for sharing. very well developed thought and easy to understand explanation.

thank you for translating 😸! so helpful !

My girlfriend's dad (not an enthusiast or especially computer savvy) has written down the number of an update which he needs to prevent windows from installing so that he can run Battlefield Vietnam, which he paid for, and a computer that he paid for running an operating system that he paid for. And hence, the case against forced updates.

I expected to find out about the actual virus. He kinda only summed up the news from this weekend. Does this virus actually encrypt your files? How can you get rid of it? (I am not affected)

Can you please make a video on how exactly the EternalBlue exploit and the DoublePulsar exploit worked? From what I understand it's a buffer overflow, but I'd love to see a detailed analysis on how the actual exploit works, It'd be very interesting and you always explain everything perfectly! Thanks!

For those who got intrested - the best I could identify out of the books on that shelf: Merkow-Breithaupt: Information Security: Principles and Practices, 2nd edition Schneier: Secrets & Lies Antonopoulos: Mastering Bitcoin VA (Springer Books): The Elements of Statistical Learning Schneier: Cryptography Engineering: Design Principles and Practical Applications Anderson: Security Engineering: A Guide to Building Dependable Distributed Systems, 2nd Edition Erickson: Hacking: The Art of Exploitation, 2nd Edition

"No one in Nottingham as far as we know has got it" sounds like he's talking about a way too familiar virus

Ad-blocker will keep me safe.

i could watch this guy all day.very entertaining bloke...

Dr. Mike Pound is the man! I will always click on a mike pound video.

could my windows 98 be affected wannaCry? or is it indeed 9,8 times as secure as windows 10 by now?

*UPDATES SYSTEM AGRESSIVELY*

You can turn off updates on some versions of Windows 10 by editing the Windows Update Service start up to disabled. Just set it to manual when you want to check for updates and disable it when they are done.

thanks for the explain !, this channel help so much

I always thought it was called "WanaCry" since it made you wanna cry.

One should be able to turn off annoying UI updates and leave only important security ones

These are the lessons to learn for everybody (any order): - Do your Updates! Always! - Have a backup, do them often, and keep one away from your PC - don't click mail attachments until you are very very very sure them being legit - Forget about antivirus snakeoil rubbish, none of them helps when its critical

On the one hand Windows only allowing brief delays in updating is useful for security purposes to keep the system up to date. On the other hand they've made the entire update system a magic black box so that when it breaks it's near impossible to fix. One of my systems keeps just saying "Updates weren't installed, click here to fix" and clicking on the prompt just goes to the setting to configure when to do updates (which aren't working).

This is why the backdoor should be off limits...unless it's consensual.

5:36 but like you said Port 445 should not be open on your WAN interface but it still spread to other networks. This just proves that big router companies had also been exploited by the NSA, don't you think? Also the NSA does not only engage in counter terrorism. They engage in every way to influence world politics to the benefit of their country.

Very well explained, thanks

I love the cubes in the background

*trojan virus starts spreading in China* China 3 years later: “oh yeah check this out”

In light of this video, I thought I might share some of my basic knowledge of exploits. While I don't necessarily understand all the code and computer science that goes into making an exploit, I get the gist of them. Either way, allow me to potentially humble most of you all: Some people in the comments section here are saying (or might) say things like "use Linux", "this is why not to use Windows" or "use macOS or iOS", etc. What they've failed to realize is that every piece of software has its bugs, and subsequently has vulnerabilities. If they would have watched the video through, and listened, they would have learned this. macOS, iOS, Linux, FreeBSD, Windows, Android, and the like all have their own histories with malware. Yes, you heard me right, the impenetrable iOS, FreeBSD, and the tech-friendly Linux all have had malware or various exploits that could and or would allow for a potential malware attack. I remember that a while back that there was the "Wirelurker" virus for Apple's iOS platform. Now, while it mostly affected Apple users in China, it may have hit some US users or other users around the world. Put simply, the Apple doesn't fall far from the tree when it comes to malware.Put simply, Apple, as all other major tech companies and their various operating systems, are subject to the laws of computers, code, and programming. In those laws, they are thereby subject to potential exploitation just as all other software and hardware developers are. However, apple has the kind of attitude that its systems are impenetrable, and are the most secure in the world. While the latter may be true, Fort Knox or even the most secure operating system is open to exploitation if the conditions are right. When it comes to Apple, they really need to get straight with their users and fix the potential mess that is iOS. I say this because if your iOS device (assuming you have one) is hacked or gets malware, what are you going to do about it. It's not like there are any antiviruses on the App Store. If Apple's "walled garden's" wall is broken, can become a swampy mess of code and malware. I'm honestly sitting back and waiting to see if a potential Samsung PR nightmare for Apple surfaces in spite of Apple's stubbornness to consider anything other what it thinks it "perfect" in terms of operating systems. Get real, Steve Job's dream of a "virus-free" Apple device is dead. This attitude that this is sill the case should've died with that dream. It simply is not realistic. I could rant on and on for days about Apple and their "security precautions," but I'll save that for another day. Now, for those Linux geeks out there: Your systems are just as vulnerable as Windows and macOS. There may not be as much malware, worms, or trojans for Linux and its "distros" or "distributions", but that doesn't mean that you are all exempt from hacks and exploits. If any of you are into jailbreaks for gaming consoles, you may recall that the PS4 was hacked on its system firmware version 1.76 and below using a FreeBSD exploit. This is due to the fact that Sony based its own 'OrbisOS' off of FreeBSD. This also opens up a completely different discussion that operating systems that are based on other ones are very likely to become vulnerable if its base's code becomes knowingly exploitable. As with anything digital in today's world, if hackers want in, they'll eventually find a way in. That's just how the system works. All in all, it is always wise to have a working and well-respected antivirus and keep your system up to date. If you do this, you are much less likely to be vulnerable and potentially lose your hardware or hard earned money. Then again, ALWAYS keep your eyes pried for potential "gray areas" when using your devices. Sites, emails, etc. that look fishy usually are. In other words, just use common sense (which I swear isn't common anymore) and make sure you're prepared, and you'll likely make it smoothly through modern, seemingly more and more digitized life.

I only watch Computerphile videos when this guy is doing the videos

This is amazing.

National Insecurity Agency

I just don't get these guys that don't want updates ever because of privacy. You are far more likely to get hacked without updates. Your files are more vulnerable to random people online rather than a big organization who is bound to get caught selling information. It is in Microsoft's best interest to keep their users' info safe rather than risk getting a huge shitstorm all over them for the bad practices they might use to make a quick buck.

The ability to turn off automatic updates (even Windows Updates) is an important ability to have - automatic updates are a potential infection vector. If the upstream side of an connection can be physically intercepted, then IP addresses can be spoofed; packets can be intercepted; even secure connections can be man-in-the-middled, and malware can be sent to the computers downstream when they ask for daily updates. For this reason, many government and business networks purposely re-direct their automatic updates to internal servers; that way updates can be downloaded and scanned or tested on an isolated network before being placed on an internal update server for the rest of the machines to download..

Best Channel ever