Global Cyberattack Hits 150 Countries, Europol Chief Says

The worldwide ransomware attack hit 200,000 victims in at least 150 countries, the head of Europe's cross-border police agency said Sunday as the full extent of the cyber-extortion became clear.....

Global Cyberattack Hits 150 Countries, Europol Chief Says - NBC News

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Global Cyberattack Hits 150 Countries, Europol Chief Says - NBC News


^Heads up for anyone that might not have the latest Windows Security updates. Has anyone here been affected by this?

Yeah, I read about this earlier. It seems to be mostly effecting Windows XP, which is no longer supported by Microsoft. It is a version of an original malware produced by the US government and has been changed to eliminate the "kill switch" that was in the original. The main thing to watch for is emails containing a link to click on that infects the computers and networks with the malware.

paul1598419 said:

Yeah, I read about this earlier. It seems to be mostly effecting Windows XP, which is no longer supported by Microsoft. It is a version of an original malware produced by the US government and has been changed to eliminate the "kill switch" that was in the original. The main thing to watch for is emails containing a link to click on that infects the computers and networks with the malware.

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Is all, much ado about nothing.

The ransomware attack hit 200,000 victims in at least 150 countries so what is that 1333 people per Country who were stupid enough to open uinknown attachments--insignificant meaningless attack I would call it --is just media hype and created hysteria and drama as is usual for media as if it mattered and it actually doesn't--anyone stupid enough to have bought the hoax and gave them any money deserves themselves and whatever happened.
On a scale of 0 to 10 of real problems in the real world this rates a 0.01 perhaps less

Yeah, I wasn't worried about it, just read the story. It would seem that Renault was a victim of this when an employee linked to an email and cost the company $900,000.00 or so. Just stupid crap like that.

It seems to be a bit more than that though, since the worm uses SMB to find unpatched machines on the local network as well. Afaik this could lead to infection of many machines within a company after a single mistake.

The important thing about it is the emphasis on making backups: Having your files encrypted by such ransomware is usually exacty the same as your harddrive suddenly crashing: data gone.

You could pay the ransom, and may or may not get your files back. You could take the harddrive to an expensive recovery company and may or may not get the data back.

One key difference would be if you relied on RAID solutions or permantently connected backup drives - those would be lost in case of ransomware but not hardware failure of a single drive. That said, very very few people run workstations with RAID configurations, but you may want to unplug that external harddrive you use for backups when not using it just in case

This is a pretty serious cyber attack. It's only costed us our NHS in the UK. You know our emergency services and hospitals for saving lives. They had to refuse patients due to this.

Windows supporting XP again may be the only good thing to come out of this.

I can totally understand why all these corporations stick with XP, it would be a logistical nightmare to swap everything over to Win 7 / 10. Obviously all MS are interested in is the $$, they are a business after all...and I understand they have to move forward with OS's, but in large companies they should be catered for with security updates. In the UK, the NHS was offered such support a couple of years ago for 5.5m, they turned it down, this is the result.
The only way the NHS would swap over to Win 7 / 10 , is if they programs they use stopped working. It's very much a "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" kind of thing

Well, if that is the case, then that is NHS's fault. I still love XP. I'm using windows 10 currently, but if they worked on optimising XP instead then it would be the best operating system to exist. XP was amazing and there is a reason why it has stuck.

I used to champion XP, but it's simply too old & limited now, if you're computer has ONE function, a purpose, then fine you don't need the bells & whistles of later OS's .

Exactly, that's why any machines I used to control machines always have XP. It is so reliable and basic to use for machining. Most CAD-CAM programs run well on XP because they were designed for XP.

While XP is still a good OS, any large operation (such as the NHS) that opted not to pay for continued support after EOL clearly doesn't know what they are doing. Hey, guess who was Home Sec. when the MS support contract for 5.5m was turned down? Guess that one came back to bite her...

A major reason for hospitals and such to still use XP is just compatibility and the long service life of diagnostic equipment compared to that of computers.

Say you bought some expensive diagnostic device like a CT, MRI or even just a plain x-ray machine 15 years ago. That would have come with drivers for XP. The actual computer would be part of the complete solution you bought, and would work perfectly fine today, 15 years later. Surely the computer is outdated, but it still performs the functions it did 15 years ago just as well.

This kind of equipment easily lasts 15 years or more, probably closer to 30 years. It also is still perfectly useful, a filmless x-ray system from 1980 can still diagnose a broken bone just fine today.

The problem comes when people network these things, which is often possible (probably 10 mbit ethernet, but heck, it lets you send the images out).

Just getting a newer computer with a newer operating system often is not an option, as drivers will not be available and such. So the only way you can keep using your perfectly fine, just 15 year old, multi-million dollar, MRI machine is using XP.

I guess air-gapping these things taking the data from them using things like usb sticks or even floppy disks would be safest, but rather impractical.

I'm sure there is -plenty- of equipment still in use today that is so old it does not even run windows. Don't be surprised if a spectrometer comes with a pc included that only runs DOS. This would probably be the case if it was from 1990 or so, just 25 years old, and the equipment is designed for service life of 30, 40 or even 50 years under normal use.

paul1598419 said:

Yeah, I read about this earlier. It seems to be mostly effecting Windows XP, which is no longer supported by Microsoft. It is a version of an original malware produced by the US government and has been changed to eliminate the "kill switch" that was in the original. The main thing to watch for is emails containing a link to click on that infects the computers and networks with the malware.

Click to expand...

It actually turns out the kill switch was present and a young lad was able to register a domain that afternoon to stop the malware. If he hadn't done the spreading of the worm would have gone exponential and we could have been looking at quite serious consequences as it spread through SMB, not the usual "oops I made a boo boo" email attachment style.

Encap said:

Is all, much ado about nothing.

The ransomware attack hit 200,000 victims in at least 150 countries so what is that 1333 people per Country who were stupid enough to open uinknown attachments--insignificant meaningless attack I would call it --is just media hype and created hysteria and drama as is usual for media as if it mattered and it actually doesn't--anyone stupid enough to have bought the hoax and gave them any money deserves themselves and whatever happened.
On a scale of 0 to 10 of real problems in the real world this rates a 0.01 perhaps less

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I thought this initially but it turns out it was spread through SMB and didn't need end user interaction to start. If the network had been set up to accept SMB connections from the outside (why...) then the worm would pwn the network. A lot more serious than trojan horse malware. Amazingly none of our clients were affected, but then we'd never let a network run something like SMB to the entire internet!

Oh and hi everyone.

Benm said:

I'm sure there is -plenty- of equipment still in use today that is so old it does not even run windows. Don't be surprised if a spectrometer comes with a pc included that only runs DOS. This would probably be the case if it was from 1990 or so, just 25 years old, and the equipment is designed for service life of 30, 40 or even 50 years under normal use.

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A couple of years ago I went into my bank and the bank manager was very clearly using a terminal running Windows 98. My other bank, a few years prior to that, had a terminal facing me that very clearly ran Windows 3.1 or perhaps Windows for Workstations/NT 3.51.

Not quite as extreme an example as you gave me but yes there are definitely ancient systems still turning the wheels of a lot of business today.

On a slight tangent here in the UK we still have BBC Radio 4 that comes to us over the "Long Wave" AM Airwaves, as well as the more usual FM and DAB, internet etc. Although the R4 transmission on LW is mostly the same as on FM, there are subtle differences including certain broadcasts of the cricket and the shipping forecast. Apparently the transmitters that run Long Wave stations still use old style thermionic valves to power the equipment. The BBC bought up the entire remaining stock (in the world) of these valves but because their lifespan is so unpredictable no-one knows truly how long R4 transmissions on Long Wave will last. They could go on for decades or the remaining valves could all blow in quick succession, so one day R4 on Long Wave could just go out forever. Although it's available through many other means, I am led to believe the shipping forecast on Long Wave is still used by some ships and as far as I know there is no contingency on what to do when R4 on Long Wave goes silent. Now that is an example of still using ancient tech, as thermionic valves went out, what, in the 50s/60s?

trencheel303 said:

If the network had been set up to accept SMB connections from the outside (why...)

CEO wanted file share access from home and there's no VPN... and IT is incompetent... Not sure what people are thinking when they do that...

Oh and hi everyone.

A couple of years ago I went into my bank and the bank manager was very clearly using a terminal running Windows 98. My other bank, a few years prior to that, had a terminal facing me that very clearly ran Windows 3.1 or perhaps Windows for Workstations/NT 3.51.

Not quite as extreme an example as you gave me but yes there are definitely ancient systems still turning the wheels of a lot of business today.

On a slight tangent here in the UK we still have BBC Radio 4 that comes to us over the "Long Wave" AM Airwaves, as well as the more usual FM and DAB, internet etc. Although the R4 transmission on LW is mostly the same as on FM, there are subtle differences including certain broadcasts of the cricket and the shipping forecast. Apparently the transmitters that run Long Wave stations still use old style thermionic valves to power the equipment. The BBC bought up the entire remaining stock (in the world) of these valves but because their lifespan is so unpredictable no-one knows truly how long R4 transmissions on Long Wave will last. They could go on for decades or the remaining valves could all blow in quick succession, so one day R4 on Long Wave could just go out forever. Although it's available through many other means, I am led to believe the shipping forecast on Long Wave is still used by some ships and as far as I know there is no contingency on what to do when R4 on Long Wave goes silent. Now that is an example of still using ancient tech, as thermionic valves went out, what, in the 50s/60s?

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See my response in red...

Good to see you back!

As for those LW transmitters, it's going to be way cheaper in the short term to just buy up all the old replacement tubes and keep the system running that way. Switching over to solid state would be very expensive, at least if they want to keep any sort of high Tx power. They may just phase out the LW transmissions completely when they run out of parts... Lots of SW/LW broadcast is going that way it seems, probably due to reduced need and high operating costs.

Certainly, CBC is phasing out a lot of its AM broadcast stations and is moving the services over to FM band ... which is useless up here with the very sparse population, AM would be nice for on the highway. It's a shame, there's something I find special about LW/SW AM broadcast ... something pleasing about that crackly/lower fidelity sound.

diachi said:

Certainly, CBC is phasing out a lot of its AM broadcast stations and is moving the services over to FM band ... which is useless up here with the very sparse population, AM would be nice for on the highway. It's a shame, there's something I find special about LW/SW AM broadcast ... something pleasing about that crackly/lower fidelity sound.

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Thanks for the welcome. Did you know that on older cars the interference on the AM radio could be heard changing in pitch in time with the engine speed? The interference from the distributor caused crackle on the radio that would speed up or slow down. You can hear this phenomenon in the beginning of Pink Floyd's "Wish you were here" where they legit drove a car at varying speeds to cause the whine and crackle you hear in the first ~minute.

trencheel303 said:

Thanks for the welcome. Did you know that on older cars the interference on the AM radio could be heard changing in pitch in time with the engine speed? The interference from the distributor caused crackle on the radio that would speed up or slow down. You can hear this phenomenon in the beginning of Pink Floyd's "Wish you were here" where they legit drove a car at varying speeds to cause the whine and crackle you hear in the first ~minute.

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You still get that interference with newer vehicles, spark plugs/coil packs and fuel injectors will do it too, not just distributors - although they don't help. A real good strong signal covers it up, but you'll hear it on weaker signals or frequencies with no transmissions. It's been a real pain in the butt for me as I run a HF station out of my truck (no distributor), noise blanker helps some but also causes distortions in the received audio. In summer I just operate stationary with the engine off, much too cold for that in the winter.

Never noticed that on "Wish You Were Here" - I'll listen out for that!