On Friday,  a piece of Ransomware, called “Wanna Cry“, was unleashed on the internet worldwide.  It has plagued over 150 countries at this point.  It has been given the name of “Wanna Cray?, because if you get it, you’ll be crying.

I have a background in IT Security, so all of my PC”s are up to date, but yours may not be.  If you’re reading this on a PC that runs Windows of any version, please do yourself and the rest of the world a favor, and check for updates.

Microsoft announced on Friday, May 12th, 2017, that they had patches to prevent these attacks for Windows all the way back to Windows XP and Server 2003.

The code usually comes in through a link you click in an email or an attachment, but this one is much more malicious.  Once infects one PC on your office network, for example, it will look for vulnerabilities and unpatched Windows PC’s on the network and infect them.  Once it has done that, it will encrypt all the files that it can access on the network and lock them.  But in this case, you will not be able to pay them and get your files back.

This evening, I learned that there are new variants of this code that are still plaguing the internet.  The new variants are not encrypting files but using the PC’s they infect to search out others on the internet.  These new variants could be used in the coming week to cause a larger outage on the internet.

If your connection seems slower than usual or you are experiencing suspicious behavior on your PC, please make sure windows and your antivirus are up to date.

If you need any help, I’ll do what I can to help.

If you are using a Linux PC or Mac, you can sit back and laugh.  🙂