IDG Contributor Network: Nothing new to (Wanna)Cry about

The WannaCry outbreak has been troubling in many regards – exposing flaws, and opening doors to much finger-pointing and blaming that have gone well beyond the handling and disclosure of nation-state cyber weapon stockpiling.

The attackers likely had a good idea of how quickly and widely the attack would spread, evidenced by the fact that their ransom demand was created in 28 languages, suggesting that they had very high expectations of the success of their attack.

WannaCry targeted Microsoft systems that were not running the latest patches, and older versions of Windows such as Windows XP, which is still widely deployed in the NHS despite being 16 years old and no longer supported by Microsoft, except under custom contracts.

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