Friday’s global attack on computers in some 150 countries was clearly a wake-up call. It took government systems offline, affected corporations of all kinds, took critical infrastructure systems out of service and even changed the agenda of the G7 meeting in Italy.
But, it was an attack carried out without much sophistication. The wave of infections was reportedly stopped by a security researcher more or less by mistake. And, the attacks used a vulnerability that was long known and addressed by the vendor – in this case Microsoft.
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