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April 20th, 2024 | 4:18 AM ET

When the Big One Hits, Who Will Be to Blame?

Posted: May 15th, 2017

By Nils Puhlmann

Nils Puhlmann is the former CSO & CTO and the Co-Founder of the Cloud Security Alliance. He is the former Chief Security Officer of Zynga, and was formerly Chief Security Officer at Qualys, and Chief Information Security Officer of Electronic Arts and Robert Half International. Puhlmann serves on the Board of Directors of Open Vulnerability and Assessment Language (OVAL) and is an Advisory Board member for several security companies.

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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