bdmetronews Desk ॥ The ransomware attack that hit dozens of countries spread quickly and widely thanks to a security hole, software issues, and tardy users.
The cyberextortion attack hitting dozens of countries spread quickly and widely thanks to an unusual confluence of factors: a known and highly dangerous security hole in Microsoft Windows, tardy users who didn’t apply Microsoft’s March software fix, and a software design that allowed the malware to spread quickly once inside university, business and government networks.
Not to mention the fact that those responsible were able to borrow weaponized software code apparently created by the U.S. National Security Agency to launch the attack in the first place.
Other criminals may be tempted to mimic the success of Friday’s “ransomware ” attack, which locks up computers and hold people’s files for ransom. Experts say it will be difficult for them to replicate the conditions that allowed the so-called WannaCry ransomware to proliferate across the globe.
But we’re still likely to be living with less virulent variants of WannaCry for some time. And that’s for a simple reason: Individuals and organizations alike are fundamentally terrible about keeping their computers up-to-date with security fixes.
One of the first “attacks” on the internet came in 1988, when a graduate student named Robert Morris Jr. released a self-replicating and self-propagating program known as a “worm” onto the then-nascent internet. That program spread much more quickly than expected, soon choking and crashing machines across the internet.
