WannaCry hackers ‘were likely from southern China’    

The authors of the WannaCry malware, which infected computers in 150 countries two weeks ago, are probably from the southern mainland, Hong Kong, Taiwan or Singapore, the South China Morning Post reports, citing a US intelligence company.

Forensic linguistic analysis on the malware suggested it was written by native Chinese-speaking people with southern accents, said Flashpoint.

In a report on its website, Flashpoint, which provides global business-risk intelligence, said it came to the conclusion with “high confidence”. Earlier reports based on code analysis suggested North Korean programmers at work.

The WannaCry malware locked up data on infected computers and displayed a message in 28 languages demanding a ransom for restoration of the data.


The hackers drafted the note in Chinese first, Flashpoint said. Based on the Chinese text, they manually produced an English version, then converted that into other languages using Google’s translation software.