After doing some research from multiple sources, I found that the best way to run the sample of malware would be within a virtual machine with no internet connection and some extra settings to ensure that it is isolated from the host machine. It is important to setup a safe environment for running the WannaCry sample. During my research, theZoo on GitHub seemed to be a great place for finding these malware samples. There are samples of malware (like WannaCry) available online to allow security researchers to reverse engineer them to find out how they work, how they can stop them and to add them to their anti-virus databases. You can read up some more about WannaCry on the Wikipedia page.

It's the one that was prominent in the news during 2017 when it hit the UK's NHS and took down a lot of their computer network. I am in charge of setting up a demonstration about WannaCry which is a ransomware attack that targets Windows computers using an exploit called EternalBlue. Next week, we are attending an event where we are trying to spread awareness about Cyber Security and to achieve that we have decided to do a couple of demonstrations.

There's a Malware Wiki for anyone who wants to research a particular piece of malware.I'm part of a club in my Sixth Form called CADS which among other things, involves learning about soft skills and cyber skills and applying those in the real world. Exercise at least some caution while going full Vinesauce on your VM. It's going to spread to folders on your actual hard drive, and you probably don't want that. Stuff like BonziBuddy should be safe to run on your computer, though.Īlso, this should be fairly obvious, but don't set up any shared folders between your VM and your host OS. Also, some viruses and malware spread over the network, so containing it within a VM won't protect you from spreading it to other computers on your network. Some viruses these days are written to detect whether or not they're running in a VM or not, and, thus, may not behave the way you expect them to, in order to prevent people from reverse-engineering or researching said piece of malware. Just because you're running a virus in a VM doesn't mean it's automatically safe and contained. Nice tutorial, though, there's probably something very important you should point out:

How to use virtualbox for virus testing