By The #CyberAvengers
Paul Ferrillo, Chuck Brooks, Kenneth Holley, George Platsis, George Thomas, Shawn Tuma, and Christophe Veltsos
Originally Published on Levick on May 15th, 2017
Curiosity, turned blind luck, saved us from something far worse from what we saw on Friday. Had it not been for a British malware researcher registering some gobbledygook of a domain name (www [dot] iuqerfsodp9ifjaposdfjhgosurijfaewrwergwea [dot] com to be exact), who knows what we would be writing about today. At the rate we are going, if we were cats, we would be burning through our nine lives faster than Tony Stark builds Ironman suits.
In our last post, we said to stop sensationalizing. We mean that. So by no means should you think that we are a tad bit overly hysterical, because WannaCry did spook us all out. Friday’s episode is proof positive of three things:
- Things can get wildly out of control real fast.
- Cyber weapons have made it out into the wild and will be used against us.
- We were horribly unprepared for this attack; we are still horribly unprepared for the next attack.
Luck – while a critical aspect of life – is not an effective resilience strategy. WannaCry has already been modified and there are variants with no “kill switch” in the code. More hurt is in order for the unprepared.
What should concern us all was the brazenness of this attack. Everything was fair game, from telecom to banks to healthcare to universities, and latest count is that people “wanna cry” in 150 countries. That’s some aggressive foreign policy when you negatively impact 75% of the world’s nations in 72 hours.