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Saturday, May 13, 2017

Accidental Hero Needs Rewarding

The “accidental hero” who halted the global spread of an unprecedented ransomware attack by registering a garbled domain name hidden in the malware has warned the attack could be rebooted.
The ransomware used in Friday’s attack wreaked havoc on organisations including FedEx and Telefónica, as well as the UK’s National Health Service(NHS), where operations were cancelled, X-rays, test results and patient records became unavailable and phones did not work.
But the spread of the attack was brought to a sudden halt when one UK cybersecurity researcher tweeting as @malwaretechblog, with the help of Darien Huss from security firm Proofpoint, found and inadvertently activated a “kill switch” in the malicious software.
Many government agencies and companies are now in deep trouble.  Those who were not should send this guy money for accidentally saving them. Windows 7, if properly updated by Windows Update is not at risk.

2 comments:

  1. Its events like this that keep me a MAC user. No mater how many times it shows as a negative to recruiters, or how often people remark my machine is obsolete, I know it will be working after the eventual Windows Apocalypse shuts everything else down.

    P.S.S. When Putin catches these guys their will be nothing left of them. From what I hear it hit Russia as bad as any nation in Europe.

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  2. There are two advantages Macs have for security:

    1. Less companies rely on them, so the incentive to look for security holes by hackers is less.

    2. Mac's OS is Linux-based, a generally more secure base.

    I doubt that the Mac is intrinsically orders of magnitude more secure. It hasn't been a target for hackers for reason #1. Earlier versions of Windows often had back doors for Windows Apps, and some weaknesses are probably still there.

    There are reports that this has North Korea written all over it. Perhaps Russia will give us a free hand.

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