Why Was the WannaCry Attack Such a Big Deal?
On Friday, May 12th, 2017, the ransomware program WannaCry started spreading to computers all over the world at an alarming rate. A couple days later, it was basically completely contained...
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It was all over the news on Friday, May 12th: Hospitals in the UK couldn’t get access to their systems and were turning patients away. Car factories in France had to shut down. A Spanish telecommunications company told their employees to shut down their computers. Computers all over the world were being infected by WannaCry, a massive hacking attack that caused worldwide computer chaos. By May 14th, more than 200,000 computers in more than 150 countries had been affected. And yet, the attack didn’t seem to cause much long-term damage. The hackers only made about $100,000 in total. We just witnessed one of the largest and strangest computer attacks ever. WannaCry is an example of a type of attack called ransomware, where the data on an infected computer...
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It was all over the news on Friday, May 12th: Hospitals in the UK couldn’t get access to their systems and were turning patients away. Car factories in France had to shut down. A Spanish telecommunications company told their employees to shut down their computers. Computers all over the world were being infected by WannaCry, a massive hacking attack that caused worldwide computer chaos. By May 14th, more than 200,000 computers in more than 150 countries had been affected. And yet, the attack didn’t seem to cause much long-term damage. The hackers only made about $100,000 in total. We just witnessed one of the largest and strangest computer attacks ever. WannaCry is an example of a type of attack called ransomware, where the data on an infected computer...
