The World has literally been shocked by the WANNA CRY ransom ware attack which unfolded over the weekend. We haven't witnessed anything similar in terms of scale and impact ever before. Earlier also every minute some computer across the world were getting hacked by ransom ware, but here the difference was the use of it was a serious Weapon, may be even we can call it the Weapon of Mass Destruction. Some say the level of sophistication has been due to the fact that National Security Agency (NSA) has coded this weapon. It's no surprise that it spread like the STUXNET worm!
Usually we have seen military infrastructure being under attack from foreign agencies and other shadowy private organisations; but I think this is the first time we are seeing the attack on Civilian infrastructure at this scale. The shadowy, Shadow Brokers group which stole NSA tools from and released have claimed earlier that they did because Trump has betrayed his core base of supporters. But now with the WANNACRY weapon on the lose, the group remains silent as ever.
So many questions arise from this whole story! Who exactly is behind it? What's their story? The Who story is being partly answered yesterday with security agencies claiming a North Korean hand behind it. I would suggest to ignore that news for the time being as it looks like the Security Agencies are simply looking to create an imaginary North Korean angle. Remember the Sony Hack earlier, it was first firmly blamed on North Korea and later emerged as an insider job.
The bigger question for me is the motive behind the attack? When you create such an unprecedented attack and that too at various Civilian infrastructure; the only thing you do is get the entire authorities hunting you down. The initial motive appears to be money as in case of every ransom ware, but is there a group/individual who is foolish to unleash the weapon like this and not anticipate the fall back? Any sane person would have gone for limited and anonymous attacks against vulnerable individuals and small organisation before unleashing attack in such scale.
May be it was meant to be a smaller attack but got out of hand as in case of many computer virus or worms. But from the time I heard this news, something tells me there is more to it than meeting the eye. My analysis would be that this would be the perfect attack the authorities could unleash against Crypto Currencies. That could be the reason why Civilian infrastructure was targeted in this attack. Now with the whole world reeling under the attack, how hard it is for authorities to create a bad perception about Crypto currencies!
In that sense, the attack could be against Crypto currency and Bitcoin in particular. It's so easy to point to the people that these kind of attacks will be possible only only if the people behind it could transact anonymously and Bitcoin helps in doing that. If a poll is run across the World today, the majority could go for a ban on Bitcoin. That is what we need to fear! Bitcoin could become history sooner than later as I thought. I would be writing another post of Crypto Currencies future soon!
In all these some focus is being put on the actions of NSA and Microsoft in the whole saga. The moment Shadow Groups leaked the NSA hacking tools and Microsoft was made aware of the vulnerabilities, they released a security patch. But that as done only for the latest OS not for XP whose support they ended. Now they are releasing the same after the attack. One have to ask whether it was a calculated ploy by Microsoft to wait for the attack before releasing the patches for non-supported OS versions. That helps in getting them migrated to Windows 10 isn't it? We never know who is behind the whole attack but everyone is a culprit here!
Comments
Post a Comment