According to Flashpoint analysts, the notes found in Wannacry were written by a Chinese native speaker with a good knowledge of English
Although almost two weeks have passed since the launch of WannaCry, one of the most dangerous ransomware attacks in recent years, the perpetrators continue to remain unknown. According to Jon Condra, John Costello and Sherman Chu, three researchers from Flashpoint, a company specialized in cybersecurity, and experts in linguistics, the notes found in the ransomware virus would have been written by a native Chinese speaker with a good knowledge of English. The three came to this conclusion after analyzing the texts used by the hackers, which are available in 28 different languages, to communicate to victims that they had been affected by WannaCry. The messages, as it is known, appeared on the displays of the infected PCs. According to the three analysts, English and Chinese were used as the base languages to translate the notes into the other languages.
English as the starting language
The main language would have been English, from which all other messages were translated. And it would have been a Chinese person who wrote it. In the note, in fact, the two researchers found few errors, a sign that the alleged author has good grammatical knowledge. According to Jon Condra, John Costello and Sherman Chu, if the English text of WannaCry were to be translated with Google Translate, it would be 95% the same as the notes found in the ransomware virus.
WannaCry: authors are Chinese
The reason behind the Chinese claim is that the message found in the Chinese version of WannaCry has a complex and error-free structure. If the hackers had translated from English to Chinese, the result would not have been identical to the one found in the Chinese language note. But why, then, if the author is a native Chinese speaker, was the message also written in English? The reason is simple: Google Translator translations, according to analysts, are more reliable if the source language to be translated is English. If the hackers had translated from Chinese to English, in fact, the notes would have been less accurate.