WannaCry still alive???
The WannaCry worm is still alive. Honda said this week that it was forced to halt production for one day at its Sayama plant near Tokyo after finding the WannaCry ransomware in its computer network.
This virus is the same one that infected over one million machines worldwide after taking advantage of security holes in some Microsoft products. According to a Honda spokesperson, about 1,000 units were not produced as planned at the plant when WannaCry attacked several older production line computers, causing them to shut down. The Sayama plant produces models such as the Accord sedan and Odyssey and StepWagon minivan models.
Production at other Honda plants had not been affected with regular operations resuming at the Sayama plant this week. Honda discovered that the virus had infected networks across Japan, Europe, North America and China, despite moves to secure its systems in mid-May when WannaCry caused widespread disruption worldwide.
Nissan and Renault were also affected by the cyber attack last month, forcing them to temporarily stop production at plants in Japan, Britain, India, France and Romania.
WannaCry has infected companies using aging technology and outdated software and this appears to be what transpired at Honda’s Sayama plant.
Cyber security company Kryptos Logic said last week that it had dealt with 60 million infection attempts from WannaCry of the past month.
Intelligence agencies have linked the virus infections to a hacking group associated with North Korea and say that the threat of further attacks still looms.
Course it's still alive.
We sadly do not yet posses an antivirus system that sends the equivalent of a blast of fire through the entire internet to "cleanse" it from a threat.
The WannaCry worm, just as most worms who've ever been created, can spread independently of their authors. as long as there are computer's in existence that isn't patched, they'll be potential hiding places for worms.
It's kind of like SIDA. The disease is so hard to kill because even if we send something through the entire body to kill the free virii, some are in places our immune system can't reach. So as soon as we're not actively chasing it, it'll emerge and re-attack vulnerable cells again.
I seem to remember some researchers at some point mentioning potentially spreading immunity to a computer virus or worm through "viral updates". Basically, if you're connected, a "security worm" would inspect your system using some special entrance made just for it and update to the latest version every single piece of software it knew was vulnerable..
I think the idea was scrapped pretty fast, as other worms could discover the entrance, and a lot of infrastructure today depends on the program using that specific version of a framework or tool, and upgrading could break an entire system unless it's recoded.