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Published on May 15th, 2017 | by Admin

Bitdefender: “WannaCry 1.0 and 2.0 are just the beginning.”

”WannaCry 1.0 and 2.0 are just the beginning. It’s probably going to get worse before it gets better, as it’s going to be one of the most serious threats for the following 12 months. Unless, Microsoft decides to do something about it, such as force an update. It has been done before and the scope of the current threat could justify doing it again, in a controlled and coordinates manner, with support from authorities and the security industry. Although borderline legal, our experience with cyber-crime has proven that legislation is often lagging when it comes to regulation, which is why cooperation between law enforcement and security vendors is needed now more than ever.

Computers in public institutions, hospitals and other care facilities are usually rarely updated. If they are not hit by ransomware now, these computers are vulnerable for state sponsored attacks for as long as they remain unpatched. Ransomware is the best case scenario now, because it’s visible. But complex threats can be built on it, to stay persistent and infiltrate organisations for a very long time.

The worst case scenario is for state-actors to use the vulnerability to install backdoors in other governments’ public institutions. They could even install the fix/updates themselves, so that nobody else would be able to use the same vulnerability. It’s a likely and plausible scenarios as everyone is now distracted by ransomware, allowing more complex threats to be easily built and executed with very little resistance and with no bells and whistles going off.”

–          Alexandru Catalin Cosoi, Chief Security Strategist at Bitdefender


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