[Cryptography] "WannaCry" ransomware has any payment resulted in a key?

[Ray Dillinger]

On 05/19/2017 06:39 AM, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:
> http://thehackernews.com/2017/05/wannacry-ransomware-decryption-tool.html
> 
> So not only was there no way to pay up, turns out that they didn't delete
> the private key from memory.
> 
> Very interesting.
> 
> Was this ransomware or merely a large scale attack pretending to be
> ransomware?
> 

A chuckle about it that happens to match a theory...

http://ffn.nodwick.com/?p=1601

I think maybe the people just wanted to disrupt things, cause fear, and
get the vulnerability out there.  One week of giant headlines to
distract people from something else, One more tool in the arsenal of
hackers who will create further distractions for you.

They could also be "burning" a zero-day exploit after finding out that
some adversary of theirs has it, in order to get it fixed and pre-empt
having it deployed against them or theirs - but if that were all they
were doing they could have just gone through bug reporting.

Then again, maybe the "no way to pay up" business was just a programming
error, or something that escaped before they were finished
building it correctly.

				Bear



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