On Friday, the world experienced the wrath of a well-coordinated ransomware attack, known as WannaCrypt. The attack caused Britain's NHS to cancel surgeries, a wide array of Russian and Chinese private and public institutions to be crippled most of the day, and the rest of the world to recoil in shock.
How could a single piece of malware that exploited a vulnerability identified long ago by the NSA, and leaked last month by a group called the Shadow Brokers, wreak so much havoc?
Alexander J. Urbelis
Alexander J. Urbelis
Before the malware could do damage in the United States, a lone British researcher, known as "MalwareTech," serendipitously identified its kill switch -- the registration of a domain name -- while on vacation. The ease with which MalwareTech did this says a great deal about the poor state of the global information security industry, and raises several important questions.
