In 2017 — for the first time in over a decade — a computer worm ran rampage across the internet, threatening to disrupt businesses, industries, governments and national infrastructure across several continents.
The WannaCry ransomware attack became the biggest threat to the internet since the Mydoom worm in 2004. On May 12, 2017, the worm infected millions of computers, encrypting their files and holding them hostage to a bitcoin payment.
Train stations, government departments, and Fortune 500 companies were hit by the surprise attack. The U.K.’s National Health Service (NHS) was one of the biggest organizations hit, forcing doctors to turn patients away and emergency rooms to close.
Earlier this week we reported a deep-dive story into the 2017 cyberattack that’s never been told before.
British security researchers — Marcus Hutchins and Jamie Hankins — registered a domain name found in WannaCry’s code in order to track the infection. It took them three hours to realize they had inadvertently stopped the attack dead in its tracks. That domain became the now-infamous “kill switch” that instantly stopped the spread of the ransomware.
As long as the kill switch remains online, no computer infected with WannaCry would have its files encrypted.
But the attack was far from over.
In the days following, the researchers were attacked from an angry botnet operator pummeling the domain with junk traffic to try to knock it offline and two of their servers were seized by police in France thinking they were contributing to the spread of the ransomware.
Worse, their exhaustion and lack of sleep threatened to derail the operation. The kill switch was later moved to Cloudflare, which has the technical and infrastructure support to keep it alive.
Hankins described it as the “most stressful thing” he’s ever experienced. “The last thing you need is the idea of the entire NHS on fire,” he told TechCrunch.
Although the kill switch is in good hands, the internet is just one domain failure away from another massive WannaCry outbreak. Just last month two Cloudflare failures threatened to bring the kill switch domain offline. Thankfully, it stayed up without a hitch.
CISOs and CSOs take note: here’s what you need to know.
