The Wannacry ransomware epidemic was especially virulent, thanks to its core: a weaponized vulnerability in Windows that the NSA had discovered and deliberately kept a secret so that they could use it to attack their adversaries. Read the rest “Wannacry ransomware cost the British National Health Service £92m ($121m)”

The epidemic of cryptojacking malware isn't merely an outgrowth of the incentive created by the cryptocurrency bubble -- that's just the motive, and the all-important the means and opportunity were provided by the same leaked NSA superweapon that powered last year's Wannacry ransomware epidemic. Read the rest “Epidemic of cryptojacking can be traced to escaped NSA superweapon”

NHS Digital has issued guidance to the independent authorities and businesses that make up the UK's National Health Service, setting out the case for storing extremely sensitive patient data on public cloud servers. Read the rest “NHS okays hospitals and doctors storing patient data on public cloud servers”

The Wannacry worm burned through the world's unpatched IT systems, hitting more than 80 countries in 24 hours, taking down hospitals, airlines, banks and logistics companies, until a hidden killswitch was able to halt its spread. Read the rest “Global Wannacry payout: $140,000 -- a superweapon in the hands of dum-dums”

Petya is a well-known ransomware app that has attained a new, deadly virulence, with thousands of new infection attempts hitting Kaspersky Lab's honeypots; security firm Avira attributes this new hardiness to the incorporation of EternalBlue -- the same NSA cyberweapon that the Wannacry ransomware used, which was published by The Shadow Brokers hacker group -- into a new Petya strain. Read the rest “A new ransomware strain is seemingly using a leaked NSA cyberweapon to race around the planet”

Whoever created the Wcry ransomware worm -- which uses a leaked NSA cyberweapon to spread like wildfire -- included a killswitch: newly infected systems check to see if a non-existent domain is active, and if it is, they fall dormant, ceasing their relentless propagation. Read the rest “An IoT botnet is trying to nuke Wcry's killswitch”

Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church is a powerful reactionary figure in the country's toxic political scene, which has welded a tale of thwarted imperial destiny to a thin-skinned fundamentalist theology that can't bear the slightest sign of mockery; he's blamed ISIS on secularism and Pride parades and says that marriage equality literally heralds the imminent apocalypse. Read the rest “Powerful Russian Orthodox cleric summoned to spritz computers with holy water to fight ransomware”

Yesterday's report of a Wcry ransomware version that didn't have the killswitch that halted the worm's spread was retracted by Motherboard and Kaspersky Lab -- but today, France's Benkow computing document a new Wcry strain that has a different killswitch -- one that has already been registered, stopping the new strain. Read the rest “Yesterday's report of hardier Wcry retracted, but new versions found”

Motherboard has retracted this story: "Correction: This piece was based on the premise that a new piece of WannaCry ransomware spread in the same manner as the one that was responsible for widespread attacks on Friday, and that it did not contain a so-called kill switch. However, after the publication of this article one of the researchers making this claim, Costin Raiu, director of global research and analysis team at Kaspersky Lab, realized that was not the case. The ransomware samples without the kill switch did not proflierate in the same manner, and so did not pose the same threat to the public. Motherboard regrets the error."

Yesterday, the world got a temporary respite from the virulent Wcry ransomware worm, which used a leaked NSA cyberweapon to spread itself to computers all over the world, shutting down hospitals, financial institutions, power companies, business, and private individuals' computers, demanding $300 to reactivate them. Read the rest “Retracted! Wcry ransomware is reborn without its killswitch, starts spreading anew”

As the Wcry ransomware burned across the globe yesterday, spreading to more than 80 countries thanks to a bug in Windows that the NSA deliberately kept secret in order to weaponize it, it seemed unstoppable. Read the rest “The virulent ransomware worm has been stopped (for now) by a hidden killswitch”