Monday 15 May 2017

WCRY Ransomware Attack 2017 –Validate If Your System is Safe Today

Breaches in IT security are spreading like wildfire all over the world. There is a new culprit found on May 12, 2017, which is known as WCRY ransomware, affected approximately 230,000 computers worldwide. It is known as WannaCrypt too.

latest ransomware 2017









Be it any business vertical, this nasty Internet offender did not restrict itself anywhere, and was designed to blow the whole IT industry. This massive cyber-attack holds the potential to encrypt data of any system within minutes and displays a message on the user’s screen, asking to pay $300 in Bitcoins for data retrieval. It quickly got spread via phishing emails and targeted unpatched applications/operating systems in the form of computer worm. In other words, it majorly targeted those machines that were using older operating systems. National Health Service of the UK, national petroleum of China, and factories of Renault situated in France were some of its victims that were affected adversely.

That’s not all! It also impacted the patient tracking systems in various renowned hospitals, which made the patient related information inaccessible to the doctors. Well! It was really a serious matter because it could lead to inapt diagnosis, surgeries, or even deaths of innocent patients. However, the patch to keep these types of vulnerability was developed a couple of weeks before the attack, but perhaps it was not applied by Microsoft at the right time. Thanks to an IT geek, who researched and found an effective ‘kill switch’ to get rid of further possible damage caused by this ransomware. It certainly reduced the speed of this spread. But, it doesn’t mean that it is wiped out completely. According to a report published by Kaspersky, a new version of this malware has been detected, which will not be stopped by ‘kill switch’. There are chances that users may come across another attack starting May 15, 2017. 


So far, the face of its creator has not come in the picture completely. But, per latest news, it is stated by various IT security agencies that these attacks were caused by some highly-advanced hacking weapons that were stolen by a group of hackers, namely ‘Shadow Broker’. Now let’s discuss the precautions. If you are using an older version of windows in your computer such as windows XP, windows server, or any other older OS, then it’s a high time to take an immediate action. Upgrade your systems with new security update to stay secured against WCRY attack. Always validate your emails prior to open their attachments, as a tiny mistake on this action may make you lose your important data. To keep your IT secured further, it is advisable to install the latest version of antivirus on your system. If you own a website, you can install an SSL certificate to protect it against cyber-attacks.  For any question related to IT security, feel free to connect with mysslonline team.      

No comments:

Post a Comment

How To Protect Yourself From Phishing Attacks?

  Scammers use emails or text messages to trap you into giving them your personal or sensitive information. They may try to steal your onlin...