Tuesday, May 16, 2017

WannaCry

Hai Pham - Week 10

Last week, I was written about the cyberattack upon the phishing and this week, on May 12, a huge cyberattack with WannaCry ransomware and mainly, bad guys used Phishing technique for an attack. 
As of Monday, May 15 2017, the attack affect about 230,000 computers in 150 countries.  The main business got affect badly were telecommunication in Spain, health services such as Britain’s National Health Service, shipping company such as FedEx and airline such as LATAM Airline.  There were four main countries got hit badly by WannaCry ransomware were Russia, Ukranine, India and Taiwan. 

WannaCry attacked thru phishing emails and on PC only, not MAC.  Once user click on the link, it will install the malware into the PC and then it uses EternalBlue Exploit and DoublePulsar Backdoor to spread through the local networks and all remote host that has no recent updates from Microsoft.  WannaCry will take the control over the host computer and it asked for the victim to pay ransom to get back the control.  If the victims do not pay for the ransom, WannaCry will delete all the encrypted files.

Did WannaCry give Financial Institution a big concern?  I think it really did.  Financial Institutions often have many confidential data and they often encrypted it.  Just think about the case of the banks got infected by WannaCry virus and all the customer information such as name, address, SSN, bank account numbers, debt info, credit card numbers, and mortgages data are affected and the banks lost the control over to those data or those data got delete?  I think it is very bad.

The key thing I see here is: it is very important for every single company to think and look the cyber threat is a real critical problem and it needs to be handle with serious matter.  Focusing on other kind of business and neglect about the cyber security is a huge mistake in our current life and business nowadays.  Again, I think the idea of “prevention is better than cure” works perfectly for cyber security.

Reference:
Wikipedia.  WannaCry ransomware attack.  Retried on 5/16/2017 from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WannaCry_ransomware_attack


Epstein, Zach.  WannaCry: Everything you need to know about the global ransomware attack.  Retried on 5/16/2017 from  http://bgr.com/2017/05/15/wanna-cry-ransomware-virus-windows-wannacry-explainer

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