WannaCry ransomware: India’s CERT to hold webcast on how to protect against this

In today’s webcast, CERT India will try and create awareness among users and organisations around this ransomware. The topic of the webcast is “Prevention of WannaCry Ransomware Threat – session by CERT-In”, and it will start at 11AM. The webcast will be available at “webcast.gov.in/cert-in/”.

Experts fear Monday will be worse for the WannaCry ransomware attack given more employees will login into their work computers, and could find they have been affected by the same. WannaCry is a crypto-ransomware, which encrypts all the data on a computer within seconds.

All your files become inaccessible, and the only way to get access back is to pay a ransom of $300 in Bitcoins. The computer flashes a message asking for the payments, if they want access to the data.

The cyberattack is believed to have been carried out with the help of NSA’s stolen hacking tools. Microsoft even issued a rare patch to Windows XP to help defend computers against the cyberattack, and has criticsed the US government for stockpiling code around vulnerabilities.

Microsoft in its blogpost said, “At the same time, it’s already apparent that there will be broader and important lessons from the “WannaCrypt” attack we’ll need to consider to avoid these types of attacks in the future.” The company also issued an update to Windows Defender to detect the WannaCrypt attack, and has promised help to customers who have been inflicted by the attack.

So far it looks like the WannaCry attack was been brought under control thanks to security researcher MalwareTech, who discovered a kill switch accidentally. The hackers had linked to a dead URL, but once MalwareTech registered to domain name for $10.69, the attack shut down. Once the domain name was bought by the researcher, it saw pings from the affected devices, which was the kill switch for the attack. It is not clear if the kill switch was intentional.