World braces for more cyber attacks as week begins

Symantec FireEye Palo Alto Cybersecurity

World braces for more cyber attacks as week begins

The world has been hit by, what's being called one of the worst cyber attacks in the history. So far, over $50,000 has been paid into the Bitcoin wallet used to collect ransoms. Barlow said that single payments in some other ransomware cases were more than that, depending on the victim. The existence of the EternalBlue exploit of Windows that the malware uses to spread has been known for some time.

As per some reports, Russian Federation faced more infections among countries.

Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) has come out with list of dos and don'ts and webcast on how to protect networks from the global ransomware attack. And while Microsoft said it had already released a security update to patch the vulnerability one month earlier, the sequence of events fed speculation that the NSA hadn't told the US tech giant about the security risk until after it had been stolen.

On Monday, senior administration officials defended the government's handling of software flaws, without confirming the NSA link to WannaCry, the tool used in the global ransomware attack.

Microsoft in March released a patch for the SMB vulnerability exploited by WanaCrypt.

A security expert in England has been hailed as an "accidental hero" for quashing the spread of the initial version of the ransomware late Friday. Meanwhile, the Group of Seven (G7) nations, which were holding a two-day meeting (May 12-13) of Finance Ministers and central bankers in Italy, released a draft statement committing to join forces to fight the rising threat of cyber attacks.

Instead of developing hacking tools in secret and holding them for use against adversaries, governments and intelligence agencies should share weaknesses they find with Microsoft and other software makers so that vulnerabilities can be repaired.


The organisation also confirmed that it was safe to connect to the service's internal email system, NHSmail, after work was completed by experts to ensure servers were ready to use. "Microsoft has a very strong position that is an absolute, whereas my position is a little bit more balanced", Grobman says.

In a blog post, Microsoft's president and chief legal officer, Brad Smith, likened the leak to a missile being stolen from the United States military: "An equivalent scenario with conventional weapons would be the USA military having some of its Tomahawk missiles stolen".

Windows 10, launched in 2015, was not vulnerable to the ransomware and is widely viewed as a big step forward in safety - but it will be many years before all the older software is retired.

The recent "WannaCry" attack was made possible by a flaw in the 15-year-old Windows XP operating system.

"Our systems prevented the virus activating and the machines were isolated", a Welsh Government spokesman said.


He went on, though, to emphasize that the attack had demonstrated the "degree to which cybersecurity has become a shared responsibility between tech companies and customers", the latter of whom must update their systems if they want to be protected.

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