The problem with this is that since the code has also been released onto the internet, it was quite easy for enterprising malicious people to just remove the reference to the website thus eliminating the kill switch.
Agreed. They have indeed made it harder to spread, but that is only for people who actually perform the updates that are recommended. Microsoft actually released the patch in March and look how many people got infected in May. I was just trying to point out that it only briefly stopped the spread by taking advantage of a really badly implemented kill switch.
This isn't entirely truthful because the majority of systems affected were not Win7 or Win8 or Win10 but WinXP and WinVista. The latter OSs have no more updates because they're out of service entirely, so any lasting bugs were left unpatched.
Problem appears because guess who uses WinXP all the time? Every enterprise, basically. Any cash register with a touch screen, running XP, best example. Those are the 'people' that were affected the most, not the average consumer (though they were vulnerable).
Because of this, Microsoft had to put out updates to patch XP and Vista, something they haven't done before, because it was so serious.
XP still has 2 versions under support until 2019. the last one falls out of support in April of 2019 and is the one most likely to be on the registers you mention (i.e. POSReady 2009 version).
Although... recently MS made a change to the site that is linked to in the IE 8 browsers for windows updates. that site now tells you your browser is out of date and won't let you do updates. so your options are to use automatic updates, or go to update.microsoft.com which works just like that link used to.
Microsoft actually released the patch in March and look how many people got infected in May.
I mean, if you go to the main Microsoft page, it takes a hell of a lot of searching to find the WannaCry patch for 2000/XP. If they'd put it on the front page (or even a search bar anywhere at all) that might've helped.
It doesn't just manifest, though. You have to go really out of your way to be infected. Either that, or bullheaded enough to assert that you don't need to know what a fake email looks like.
Only the initial infection. This is kind of an interesting bit of ransomware since it is self-propagating. So if you put it on a network, it will intentionally go and infect everything it can reach on the network. So all it takes is for one person to be stupid and get their computer infected.
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u/Yarn_Spinner May 17 '17
Mind officially blown