Who doesn’t love an anniversary and the opportunity to reminisce about “where we were” when an historical event happened? Such is the case over the last several days when it comes to remembering WannaCry, the ransomware that infected thousands of computers five years ago and cost companies all over the world billions of dollars in damages.
WannaCry broke onto the infosec scene on May 12, 2017. Taking advantage of the vulnerable version of the Server Message Block (SMB) protocol, it ultimately infected approximately 200,000+ machines in more than 150 countries. While Microsoft had issued a patch for the SMB flaw more than a month before the attacks began, millions of computers had not been unpatched against the bug. The largest ransomware attack ever, it impacted several big names globally, including the UK’s National Health Service, US delivery giant FedEx, and Deutsche Bahn, the German railway company.