By CGTN's Ding Dai
We live in an IT era when it's easy to save files on computers and get data through the Internet; but the other side of the coin is that once your computer is attacked, you risk losing important data and never getting it back.
Over the past few days, the nightmare has become a reality across the world: a ransomware called Wannacrypt - or also Wannacry - hacked computers worldwide and forced users to pay ransoms for their files. While the infection rates have slowed, discussions are going beyond the malware itself.
Microsoft's president, Brad Smith, pinned the blame on the US government for not disclosing more software vulnerabilities, saying the ransomware was drawn from hack tools stolen from the National Security Agency (NSA).
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Speaking to CGTN's World Insight, Robert Siciliano, a security analyst with Hotspot Shield, argued: “The reality of it is Microsoft created a flawed operating system that had a vulnerability that the NSA, a US government agency, essentially discovered and exploited. And that exploit was leaked to the public, at least via some internal flaws that the NSA had on their own.”
He also noted there was no such a thing as 100-percent security.
For Ernest McDuffie, founder of the Global McDuffie Group: “This idea of awareness of the public and what they can actually do about it is the critical piece.”
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Errors in the software were to be expected, he added: "Software is created by human beings and there are going to be always errors in the software so this idea of patches always coming up is something we’re going to be living with until we find a way to create software that’s perfect all the time.”
Information about the vulnerability that is now being exploited by the ransomware has actually been public for some time, and Microsoft released a patch a little while ago. But the attack's unusually large scale proves that patch wasn't enough.
So far it's still unknown who is behind the cyber-attack. But rather than finding the hackers, the more important issue for the world seems to be how to better prepare against this danger.
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