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Windows XP Computers Were Mostly Immune To WannaCry (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Windows XP isn't as vulnerable to the WannaCry ransomware as many assumed, according to a new report from Kryptos research. The company's researchers found that XP computers hit with the most common WannaCry attack tended to simply crash without successfully installing or spreading the ransomware. If true, the result would undercut much of the early reporting on Windows XP's role in spreading the globe-spanning ransomware. The core of WannaCry is a vulnerability in a Windows file-sharing system called SMB, which allowed WannaCry to spread quickly across vulnerable systems with no user interaction. But when Kryptos researchers targeted an XP computer with the malware in a lab setting, they found that the computers either failed to install or exhibited a "blue screen of death," requiring a hard reset. It's still possible to manually install WannaCry on XP machines, but the program's particular method of breaking through security simply isn't effective against the older operating system. The worst-case scenario, and likely scenario," the Kryptos report reads, "is that WannaCry caused many unexplained blue-screen-of-death crashes." While they cut against much of the early analysis of WannaCry, Kryptos' findings are consistent with early research from Kaspersky Lab, which found that Windows XP accounted for an "insignificant" percentage of the total infections. Kaspersky found the bulk of infections on machines running Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008.
That WinXP was reliable by crashing?
Old outdated technology is immune to the modern virus.
This is good to know and all, but I'm still not going to let my old xp laptop back online anytime soon. I really like that laptop and would like to keep it operating as is, and it hasn't been allowed to access a network since the early 2000s.
who's laughing now?
I bet they still are...
My Windows 3.1 PC was mostly immune too. Mostly.
Immune like that kid who was already dying so all the zombies ran around him.
Apparently you can manually aim at your own foot and mostly miss if you use WINE to install the wannacry .exe... But really, Linux is unaffected.
The distro I'm using is also much more modern than a fifteen year old abandoned OS from M$.
They manage to get just about everything wrong within the first 24-48 hours of a story breaking. There is zero fact checking anymore until long after the story has blown over. The entertainment press just wants to get your eyeballs on the story on their website and news channels. But what people remember is the first story, the first impression they receive, even years later.
Everyone remember Columbine? Whatever you think you know about that story is probably wrong. There's some well written accounts of that one years later that completely debunked nearly everything the media wrote about that crime. The press got it wrong from the outset and doubled down every day. Only later when sober minded people looked at what happened did the real story finally come out.
The majority of the spread was caused by Windows 7 machines, several months after security updates were released.
In March, we released a security update which addresses the vulnerability that these attacks are exploiting. Those who have Windows Update enabled are protected against attacks on this vulnerability. For those organizations who have not yet applied the security update, we suggest you immediately deploy Microsoft Security Bulletin MS17-010.
https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/msrc/2017/05/12/customer-guidance-for-wannacrypt-attacks/
Release March 14: Microsoft Security Bulletin MS17-010 - Critical
Who the fuck complains about Q Sound?
It's like how a dumpster fire is immune to AIDS.
I wonder, were the XP machines that just crashed IA-32? Perhaps the exploit payload was 64 bit only?
So what does that mean for Brian Barrett and the Wired ? Impunity in the mainstream is the main cause for Fake News. Wired should have apologized for publishing nonsense.
Linux was too.
My Windows 3.1 machine is safe as well, because it can't connect to the internet.