MemeNews Alert!

Stupidest fucking species possible puts life and death oriented machinery on same global network we all use for porn, acts surprised when shit goes predictably wrong.

Rats begin rapidly drafting rules for civilization as the realization that humans are self-extincting increasingly ahead of schedule reaches their leaders.

You wont believe these five shocking signs that stars are actually angels lighting their farts...

The frustrating thing is that many of those people ARE doing their jobs, but they've been fucked over because the IT department didn't do theirs.

Or, in other cases, the budget is such that the IT department consists of one guy who installed Windows XP in 2004 and was never heard from again.

But it's still hilarious/terrifying that this ransomware is crippling major systems around the world when Microsoft released a free patch that negates it a fucking month ago.

I know people who hate Windows 10 for being so heavy-handed in its automatic mandatory security updates that you can't disable (well you probably can with enough know-how, but). But then something like this happens and you begin to appreciate why Microsoft got so heavy-handed with the updates. As far as I know, Windows 10 has been virtually immune because it keeps itself updated; it's the people who choose not to keep up on the updates (Windows 7, Windows 8.1) who are getting nailed. And of course, people whose Windows is no longer supported (XP, 8, 2003).

Speaking of, patches have been released for those unsupported operating systems, to try to put a clamp on this:

http://thehackernews.com/2017/05/wannacry-ransomware-windows.h tml

I like the "Russia was hit hardest (but actually only 1000 computers at their Interior Department were affected)" part. If that's the hardest hit, I wonder what happened the other 71-or-so countries.


On the down side, it's entirely possible that people died because of this someplace in the world, since a lot of the targets were medical facilities.

But regardless of how serious the actual attack was, it IS another example of the NSA's inability to keep its shit in order security-wise, and regardles of your opinion of the NSA itself, when they can't even keep random people from walking out (literally or figuratively) with their top secret hax0ring tools that IS serious.

For that matter, since apparently one could disable WannaCry just by registering a given domain, why didn't the NSA do so? Seems like they didn't know they could do that.

Wannacry is a revision of a worm that's been in the wild for a long long time, and it's not what was supposedly stolen from the NSA.

You don't get it from clicking on bad links (although you can), it spreads by itself with zero user interaction through networks using a vulnerability in default settings for smb shares.

The specific method of infection used in this case is the exploit that was "stolen", not the malicious code itself. We're lucky somebody didn't figure it out on their own before all this happened without bothering to tell microsoft, because you and everyone you know who uses windows would be totally fucked right now. There's also no evidence whatsoever that it was even stolen, besides the sayso of some security group who warned microsoft they were releasing the exploit publicly... which was what prompted the patch in the first place back in march. Oh, and also these guys have been trying to sell the exploits since last year. They're not releasing them out of the kindness of their hearts to warn the world about what's going on... they're throwing a temper tantrum because nobody wanted to pay.

Nobody has any idea if this crap was even stolen from the NSA, or if it was, what the circumstances of the theft were. It's not a coincidence where this shit is all coming from.

Stars for Monkey Napoleon for setting the record straight. Thanks!!

Haha not from free ones, idiot, you gotta put in your credit card number first.

For what it's worth, one of my coworkers' husbands is a network security specialist and he was already kind of freaking out about this (that is, the NSA's software tools being leaked to the black market) long before the whole Wikileaks thing the other month, and takes it really seriously.

People should be really scared, if they believe the story that's going around.

This is just the latest in a series of these botched blackmail attempts by ShadowBrokers going back to mid 2016. Each time it's getting more and more serious. This is like stage 5, iirc.

It just bugs the ever-loving shit out of me how this is being reported. A bunch of stuff is being ignored, plus the normal problem with tech and science reporting where it's grossly over-simplified and also kind of wrong anyway.

News to do with the intelligence community should always be viewed by everyone through welding goggles made of pure skepticism with the optional "assume everything they say is completely fabricated" filter.