Cybersecurity bods at the Met Police, NHS and the Local Government Association in the UK believe ransomware will be one of the biggest threats facing the British public sector next year. Speaking at the Cyber Security in Healthcare event at the UK Health Show in London, the public sector heads discussed the predicted …

One of the UK National Health Service boards hit by WannaCrypt earlier this year has again been infected by malware. The Lanarkshire board manages the Hairmyres Hospital, Monklands Hospital, and Wishaw General Hospital in Scotland, and on Friday had to warn patients that it was only handling emergency cases. Lanarkshire was …

WannaCrypt crippled 230,000 Windows PCs internationally, hitting unpatched Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 and computers still running Microsoft's seriously old Windows XP, though the latter wasn't responsible for its spread. The initial reaction was a predictable rush to patch Microsoft’s legacy desktop operating systems. …

Perhaps noticing the popularity of Samba apps for Android, Google's decided to plant its own flag in the space, and yesterday released its official Android Samba Client. It landed on Google Play here, and almost immediately users noticed something worrying. It only supports SMBv1 shares. SMBv1 is known to be exploitable ( …

UK Parliamentary spending watchdogs at the National Audit Office have launched an inquiry into the impact of the recent WannaCrypt ransomware attack on the NHS. Although not aimed specifically at the NHS, the ransomware nonetheless spread across hospital networks, leaving medical staff unable to access patient data, forcing …

A contractor in the Australian State of Victoria has managed to infect an unknown number of speed cameras with a virus, over sneakernet. Details aren't so much sketchy as they are confused: the virus has been identified as WannaCrypt, but the government's been told it infected both Linux and Windows-based cameras; there was no …

Honda said today that it had briefly halted operations at a car plant in Sayama, Japan earlier this week because of the infamous WannaCrypt ransomware. The Japanese car maker halted production for one day at a domestic vehicle plant on Monday after finding samples of the WannaCrypt ransomware in its computer network, Reuters …

Network security has improved little over the last 12 months – millions of vulnerable devices are still exposed on the open internet, leaving them defenceless to the next big malware attack. A follow-up audit by Rapid7 – the firm behind the Metasploit pen-testing tool – found that more than a million endpoints were confirmed …

Britain has a long-term health problem: Britons are living longer with conditions that would previously have killed them. This is obviously great for the people concerned, but not for the government, which is on the hook for most of the nation’s healthcare costs. This election has seen technology, along with new buildings, …

Mistakes in the WannaCrypt ransomware worm might allow files to be restored after infection. A crack team of security researchers at Kaspersky Lab has discovered that WannaCrypt/WannaCry, which infected hundreds of thousands of victims at the beginning of May, contains several coding errors. Most of the whoopsies make it …

CommentWannaCry is Microsoft's fault. Microsoft, of course, blames the victims and system administrators get fired. But every one of us is to blame because we refuse to force our governments to hold software-makers to account. Criminals are here to stay. Anyone who thinks they will somehow be defeated, go away or simply give up is …

Yes, WannaCrypt can infect all those machines that still run Windows XP, but because XP is so flaky the zombie boxen are unlikely to have contributed much to the spread of the worm. That's the conclusion of Kryptos Logic researchers after a couple of weeks trashing crash-test-dummy machines in the laboratory. The company …

Shadow Brokers, the group that leaked stolen NSA hacking tools including the vulnerability that proved key to the WannaCrypt outbreak, has launched a new exploit subscription service. Subscriptions for the zero-day feed will cost 100 ZEC (Zcash cryptocurrency) or $21,000 per month. The group emptied its Bitcoin wallet on …

The WannaCrypt ransomware is yet another reminder, if any were needed, that the networks and machines on which society is now so reliant are laughably insecure. “Laughably” being the key word, after your correspondent somehow found himself in a Tweet-storm in which a series of very fine visual WannaCrypt jokes appeared. This …

The ‪WannaCry‬pt extortion notes were most likely written by Chinese-speaking authors, according to linguistic analysis. WannaCry samples analysed by security outfit Flashpoint contained language configuration files with translated ransom messages for 28 languages. All but three of these messages were put together using Google …

NHS Digital stopped short of advising health organisations in England not to cough up for the WannaCrypt ransom attack because it couldn't be certain that all hospitals had backed up patient records. Dan Taylor, head of security at NHS Digital, told thousands of NHS organisations everything about the attack – except explicitly …

Hospitals connected to Australian State of Queensland's integrated electronic medical record system (ieMR) are suffering outages attributed to patching against a ransomware attack. Since the ransomware-de-jour is WannaCry/WannaCrypt, it's a fair bet that's what Queensland Health was working to patch, but somewhere along the …

Miscreants have created a strain of malware that targets the same vulnerability as the infamous WannaCrypt worm. EternalRocks worm uses flaws in the SMB Server Message Block (SMB) shares networking protocol to infect unpatched Windows systems. Unlike WannaCrypt, EternalRocks doesn't bundle a destructive malware payload, at …