A massive cyberattack brought computers to a halt on Friday and Saturday, the malware affecting over one lakh computers and systems in nearly 150 nations worldwide, ranging from the UK National Health Service to a French carmaker with an alliance plant in Chennai, the German railways, the Andhra Pradesh police and entire Russian systems. Such ransomware attacks are commonplace, with an estimated 600 million attacks likely recorded in 2016 alone. This particular worldwide security threat, which hasn’t yet run its course, was dismantled by a UK security expert who activated an address that the “kill switch” in the ransomware was compelled to search for. The whole containment process happened quite by accident, security experts said. The attack on Britain’s NHS was potentially the most devastating as thousands of patients’ appointments were cancelled, ambulances rerouted, records lost and chaos followed, despite the warnings delivered, some as recently as last year, on the vulnerability of outdated systems.
The suspicion that the vulnerability of systems around the world were exploited by a hacking tool thought to have been developed by America’s National Security Agency exposes the fact that governments may be the ones most to blame as their intelligence agencies are the ones who create such openings to spy on people through the communications networks linking smartphones by exploiting loopholes in their operating systems. It’s possible an NSA contractor may have been careless in leaving the hacking tool on an unsecured computer from which it was stolen by a hacking collective, that may have auctioned it on the dark net, although it came as a crumb of comfort that a domain name costing less than Rs 800 to create may have found the antidote to stop this virulent attack, the worst in the new millennium since the Love Bug virus. It’s known organisations like the NSA develop tools to exploit computer systems in order to spy on people, including potential terrorists and their plots, of course. The fact is that a cache of cyber weapons was said to have been stolen from the NSA by the same collective behind the WannaCry ransomware that created the biggest-ever extortion racket to hit the Internet.
The harsh lesson to be learned is that we have to better protect our systems, at the individual, corporate and government levels. The cost of buying Internet anti-virus security programs must be built into all budgets, besides levels of alacrity in putting to work security patches that leading companies like Microsoft put out to protect systems from malware. This is also about the ability of the cyber police to crack such crimes because experts are already warning that the WannaCry ransomware threat is nothing compared to what might be coming soon if major fixes are not employed swiftly.
