NSA leaked malware used for ransomware

Discussion Open Forum
1

Some the NSA’ s leaked malware has now been used for ransomware on unpatched Windows machines.

Keep up the good work deep state! (sarc)

2

Your tax dollars at work. Meanwhile America’s longest and costliest war continues with no end in sight and most Americans aren’t even aware of it.

3

Affected the whole world … except North Korea.

Dunno why but Taiwan was mentioned among the worse affected places. Given that our are computers at work are regularly the target of hackers, dunno if tomorrow we must take extra especial precautions.

4

According to the news, somebody found a kill switch on it and activated it but then the hackers released a new version of the virus.

5

I think I might get murdered if I mention the L word on this forum again… but yeah… Linux guys…

6

For some reason most small and medium Taiwanese companies seem completely unwillingly to update any software. Almost every supplier I’ve visited in Taiwan when it comes to making presentations struggles to continually close all the windows, adobe, Office etc update notifications that keep popping up. I’m guessing they don’t update as much of the software is unlicensed. We also have some suppliers running custom software where the employee or company that wrote it is long go, rather than paying to have someone rewrite the software they’re struggling along using XP or even Windows 98 on some computers.

Yeah, why put on a bandaid when you can just chop your hand off? Linux is just as susceptible to ransomware, the only reason it’s not in the news is that the user base is so small compared to Windows. The fix for Linux is the same as the fix for Windows, update to the latest version. An up to date version of Windows 10 is completely safe from the current ransomware issues. Out of date versions are at risk, as are out of date versions of Linux.

7

If there is a exploitable security weakness in any OS, the fix will always be update to the latest version. However, there are several things that makes Linux better in this respect:

  1. Due to its open source nature, everyone can help to identify and fix the problems, whereas in Windows, Microsoft will only fix the problems when something is being exploited.

  2. As a company, Microsoft is more susceptible to being demanded by government agencies to place certain deliberate security weakness inside their system. Whereas in open source projects, chances of such actions being identified is a lot greater.

  3. With Windows, upgrading to the newest version means paying more money, going to a version with UX that you do not like, or even worse, the new version might not work with your hardware all together. With Linux, you at least get to fix the underlying kernel, driver or user library a piece at a time without being forced to change things you want to keep around.