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Mikko Hyppönen at WithSecure shares WannaCry anniversary comments
May 2022 by Mikko Hyppönen, Chief Research Officer at WithSecure
Ahead of the WannaCry anniversary, Mikko Hyppönen, Chief Research Officer at WithSecure shares the following:
“The WannaCry malware epidemic of spring 2017 was unique in the field of information security. This historic attack was one of the biggest of all time and destroyed hundreds of thousands of computers, almost exclusively targeting large corporations. Companies all over the world were infected: hospitals, car factories, power plants, train companies - the list goes on.
While the impact was vast and its distribution wide, the attack did not succeed in its task. WannaCry’s code was full of bugs, and ransom
collection did not work properly. Paying the ransom did not restore the victim’s data, and knowledge of this spread quickly.
In the end, the North Koreans received only 60 bitcoins in their wallet, despite infecting more than 200,000 computers around the world.
You could argue that this event shaped our ‘modern’ ideas of ransomware, forever providing a stark reminder of the constant battle security teams face and we hope an attack of this scale and magnitude is one which we never see again.”
