Leaked NSA Tools Used in Global Cyberattack

Be realistic: switching to a different OS is expensive proposition - extremely expensive for large organisations. Not everyone has those funds just sitting around with nothing to do. Not only, but thousands of large-scale apps that don't have a non-Windows counterpart must be ported and debugged to work under the new OS. Then you have the learning curve of all the organisations' users and the lost productivity from that meanwhile. Very, very, very expensive. It's not just a matter of strolling down to the corner store and getting new stuff.

All operating systems are vulnerable to hacking. Microsoft issued a patch before this but not everybody updated their systems. *nix systems that aren't patched get hacked too. IOS gets hacked. Windows is a huge target. Smaller targets don't hacked as often because of the unfavourable risk/benefit ratio. You don't see ransomware hackers going after KolibriOS or Bada users, do you? What would be the point?

According to reports this was a leaked NSA tool and deployed in relatively unaltered form. Assuming it was unaltered, my question then becomes: Why is the NSA writing ransomware? Hacking into systems for intelligence purposes I can understand, but ransomware?

I certainly hope the NSA is not writing ransomware, but nothing surprises me anymore. Somebody's got to pay for the promises Hillary made when she was campaigning.

"Why is the NSA writing ransomware?"

It isn't. Most likely they found an existing bug in the software, and wrote the code used to take advantage of the bug. This is the "attack vector" (to take access of, or deliver their own code), which is what the hackers used to deliver the "payload" (the ransomware).

So it (normally) comes down to 3 things: 1. Vulnerability 2. Exploiting the vulnerability to gain access 3. Delivery of that code that takes control/'eavesdrops'.

I took a DHS course on security for SCADA systems last year. By the end of the first day, I felt like I was wearing the "Emperors New Clothes" - at a gay bar.