On Friday, May 12th, the largest cyber-attack ever was launched against several hundred thousand computers across over a hundred and fifty countries. The attack was done via the ransomware WannaCry which encrypted computer users' data and asked them to pay a ransom of $300 in bitcoin. Over fifty thousand dollars of ransom was paid over the succeeding days.
The attack affected many hospitals in Europe, several companies, and countless private customers. Although its scope was global, it appeared that the primary targets were Russia, Ukraine, and Taiwan. The attack was ultimately stymied when a British researcher accidentally triggered the code kill-switch.
The attack comes just a month after the hacker group Shadow Brokers released the same code stolen from the National Security Agency as what was used in the WannaCry outbreak. The NSA has drawn criticism following the event as over ninety percent of its funding goes towards offensive computer monitoring, provoking commentary on how little defensive computer monitoring it does and how devastating its cyber weaponry is when wantonly released.
After Shadow Brokers unveiled the NSA code, Microsoft highly encouraged its users to upgrade their operating systems so that their computers would be safe from an inevitable attack. Many Microsoft users either did not know how to or did not want to upgrade their OS and, consequently, the WannaCry was able to pilfer through them easily. It is suspected that Russia and Ukraine were hardest hit because many of their civilian computers still rely on older, outdated Microsoft OS systems.
Several accusations have been made against North Korea and its Lazarus hacker affiliates for arranging the attack but no clear evidence from the intelligence agencies of America and other Asian countries has supported the claim. Russian President Vladimir Putin blamed the United States for the attacks as it was its code that the hackers utilized. The true identity of the perpetrator remains unknown. Analysts feared additional attacks in the succeeding days but none occurred.
