Surprising information about the WannaCry virus
Nine days ago, the WannaCry ransom worm infected more than 200 computers in more than 000 countries. During the outbreak, hospitals stopped admitting patients and banks and telecommunications companies shut down. Researchers have spent time since the attack analyzing the self-replicating attack and learning about details that shed new and sometimes surprising light on the largest ransomware attack to date.
The most important and strange finding is that more than 97 percent of the infections affected computers running Windows 7 were among the attacks detected by Kapersky Lab. In contrast, infected Windows XP machines were virtually non-existent, and the number of such infected machines is so low that it is suspected that they may have been manually infected by their owners for testing.
The studies refute the view adopted so far that the outbreak is largely the fault of end users who continue to use a PC running Windows XP. In fact, researchers said XP was largely left untouched by last week’s worm because PCs crashed before WannaCry could continue to infect. Instead, the most important contributors to the virtually spread infection now appear to have been Windows 7 machines that did not have Microsoft’s critical security patch released in March installed.
According to Kaspersky, the fact that Windows 7 x64 versions were the most exposed operating systems is due only to the fact that this version is widely used by large organizations and companies, so it is twice as infected as the Versions of Windows 7 that are mostly used in homes and small offices. It’s not yet clear whether this also shows that the bigger a company is, the less they pay attention to important updates, but if so, it could pose a serious threat in the near future.
