Ransomware attacks across Europe

The UK's NHS as well as systems in Russia, Ukraine, Spain, Portugal, Italy and more have been hit by ransomware attacks.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-39899646
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-39901382

This seems the largest scale cyberattack I've ever seen, though I wonder how meaningful it is. Not good that the NHS has had to shut their computers down and have cancelled operations etc as a result but I would have thought that any IT system worth its salt would be backed up and you'd lose at most 24 hours data as things get shut down and restored to a backup?

I back up all my data automatically to Microsoft's cloud and take no other precautions. I do wonder sometimes what would happen if my system and Microsoft's cloud got attacked simultaneously but I kind of think if that did happen the world would have bigger problems. May be worth doing an offline backup from time to time I suppose though.

Report now updated to worldwide rather than Europe.

In my experience, Russian agents have been targeting our electronic health record system with cyber-attacks at least once a week for the past several years. But I'm still glad this was my last day at work for a week and a half.

Re. severity and consequences, any other kind of outage would normally be manageable because everything is usually backed up and every hospital has contingency plans for ordinary outages. This particular event presents a much greater challenge not only because of the scale and the suddenness but also because of the inherent difficulty of sanitizing and securing a massive EHR system and associated infrastructure. Given the US intelligence hacking leaks, can you trust any component of your IT infrastructure? Bringing everything back online in a secure fashion with guaranteed data integrity is going to be a monumental task. I think the UK may be better prepared than many other countries however.

EDIT: Okay I may have been given a slightly exaggerated picture of the attack :o

https://www.theguardian.com/technolo...e-cyber-attack

Kill switch "discovered"

https://flipboard.com/@thenextweb/-d...thenextweb.com

So, the gutter press just outed the guy who stopped wannacrypt or whatever it's called for literally no reason.

Nice job guys.

Great work.

Really, really great.

Hope you're pleased with yourselves.

Pricks.

That's dumb. :rolleyes:

So that guy who stopped Wannacry has now been arrested and is getting prosecuted by the FBI. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-40923065

Based on a first glance, with how much freedom the judge gave this guy he doesn't seem overly impressed with the case so far.