WannaCry Cyber Attack left a lot of data crippled. Guess who’s not crying? VPN users

Author: Stephen Lee

Last Friday, WannaCry "ransomware" cyber attach struck globally in what has become one of the fastest –spreading extortion campaigns on record.

The virus infected more than 300,000 machines in 150 countries since Friday and the victim numbers continue to grow. In this very moment, someone could be clicking a link or activating macros in a malicious document.

A few seconds later, the entire hard disk content, personal files and sensitive information, everything including cloud storage accounts synced with PCs could be locked for good. Or for a good tidy ransom. A pop up in bad graphic could then appear on screen asking for "cold hard cash" in return for a decryption key.

Technical clues found in the code of WannaCry ransomware by researchers could link to the same North Korean group. However, no conclusive proves have been found for a clear conclusion in any of the aforementioned attacks.

If in the case of Sony Pictures cyber attack, the goal was to prevent the release of The Interview, a film that mocked a North Korean leader, in contrast WannaCry was wildly random infecting everything it could.

WannaCry didn’t seem to have a pecuniary goal, with more than 200,000 machines infected and around $70,000 paid in ransoms, it’s a terrible return.

Analysts are now turning to another hypothesis, maybe the ransom was a distraction for a political goal that has yet to clearly surface.

And here’s were things get really confusing and could take a really steep turn for the left so brace yourself for what I will reveal in the following of what the political implication could be

Brad Smith, President of Microsoft Corp, confirmed in a blog post on Sunday that WannaCry attack made use of a hacking tool developed by the NSA (US National Security Agency) that had leaked online in April. This pours fuel on the long running debate over espionage and cyber warfare conduct and software flaws best kept secrets.

Here are the most common infection methods used by cybercriminals.

  • Spam email campaignsthat contain malicious links or attachments
  • Security exploits in vulnerable software;
  • Internet traffic redirects to malicious websites;
  • Legitimate websites that have malicious code injectedin their web pages;
  • Drive-by downloads;
  • SMS messages (when targeting mobile devices);
  • Botnets;
  • Self-propagation(spreading from one infected computer to another)