microsoft was the major u.s. company that was attacked by the wannacry randsomware.
microsoft was the major u.s. company that was attacked by the wannacry randsomware.
which major u.s. company was attacked by the wannacry randsomware?
microsoft
the wannacry ransomware attack was a may 2017 worldwide cyberattack by the wannacry ransomware cryptoworm, which targeted computers running the microsoft windows operating system by encrypting data and demanding ransom payments in the bitcoin cryptocurrency. it propagated through eternalblue, an exploit developed by the united states national security agency (nsa) for older windows systems. eternalblue was stolen and leaked by a group called the shadow brokers a few months prior to the attack. while microsoft had released patches previously to close the exploit, much of wannacry's spread was from organizations that had not applied these, or were using older windows systems that were past their end-of-life. wannacry also took advantage of installing backdoors onto infected systems.
wannacry ransomware attack
researcher marcus hutchins accidentally discovered the kill switch domain hardcoded in the malware. registering a domain name for a dns sinkhole stopped the attack spreading as a worm, because the ransomware only encrypted the computer's files if it was unable to connect to that domain, which all computers infected with wannacry before the website's registration had been unable to do. while this did not help already infected systems, it severely slowed the spread of the initial infection and gave time for defensive measures to be deployed worldwide, particularly in north america and asia, which had not been attacked to the same extent as elsewhere. on 14 may, a first variant of wannacry appeared with a new and second kill-switch registered by matt suiche on the same day. this was followed by a second variant with the third and last kill-switch on 15 may, which was registered by check point threat intelligence analysts. a few days later, a new version of wannacry was detected that lacked the kill switch altogether.
wannacry ransomware attack