This month’s Canvas ransomware attack—in addition to making finals week more stressful for thousands of college students and their professors—was a stark reminder about the continued threat of ransomware. Consider it a bit of a Tech Time Warp. It’s enough to make you “WannaCry,” which is exactly what many computer users were doing in mid-May 2017.
Business as usual—until it isn’t
The Microsoft blog posts about the WannaCry ransomware attack are an interesting historic artifact. The message from May 12, 2017, offered helpful information to network administrators, but it also stopped just short of saying “I told you so,” reminding users that the vulnerability exploited by WannaCry had been fixed in a security update released two months prior. The blog post also offered this interesting factoid: “The trend towards increasingly sophisticated malware behavior, highlighted by the use of exploits and other attack vectors, makes older platforms so much more susceptible to ransomware attacks. From June to November 2017, Windows 7 devices were 3.4 times more likely to encounter ransomware compared to Windows 10 devices.”
Two days later, Microsoft stopped pulling any punches, telling the world in a blog post that the WannaCry hackers were using exploits stolen from the United States’ National Security Agency. “[T]his attack provides yet another example of why the stockpiling of vulnerabilities by governments is such a problem,” Microsoft wrote. “… The governments of the world should treat this attack as a wake-up call. They need to take a different approach and adhere in cyberspace to the same rules applied to weapons in the physical world.”
The damage
It’s estimated WannaCry affected over 300,000 computers in 150 nations and caused damages in the billions of dollars. In December 2017, the U.S. and the U.K. publicly stated North Korea was behind the attack.
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Photo: Mostovoy Sergio/Shutterstock
