Pub. 6 2017 Issue 2

The CommunityBanker 16 Painful Lessons from WannaCry Ransomware By Preston Curry, CISA, CISSP,Conetrix specific type of malware named WannaCry made international headlines earlier this month after achieving an unprecedented infection rate. Us- ing EternalBlue, a recently leaked tool from the US Intelligence community, it installed malicious software that encrypted files then required victims to pay a ransom to restore them. The timing of this tool’s release and subsequent use in such a wide- spread event has taught – and retaught - network administrators around the globe to revisit the basic lessons of security. Patching is still king. Every conference, webinar, magazine, and coffee shop IT person will remind you to patch your systems. Thankfully, their constant reminders are less intrusive than ransomware locking down your files. When EternalBlue was originally re- leased, experts anticipated the malware would primarily af- fect older Windows XP and Server 2003 systems. In reality, of the estimated 355,000 systems compromised by WannaCry, almost 80% were unpatched Windows 7 Pro and Server 2008 operating systems (https://intel.malwaretech.com/botnet/ wcrypt). Microsoft released the patch MS17-010 to correct B A N K B Y T E S