WannaCry refuses to leave the playground and admit defeat when on Sunday, it managed to affect a factory of Honda and halt its activity. Professionals began working on a solution straight away, but it was not until Tuesday that they were able to restore full-control over the plant of Sayama. On Monday, the factory was closed down entirely.
Sayama is one of the plants that Honda controls and it is located in Japan. According to the reports (that are all over social media, obviously), computer systems in the factory got infected with a WannaCry crypto-viruses and that forced some of the essential systems to cease all processes.
WannaCry is a recent but extremely famous variant of ransomware that quickly spread all over the globe and affected astonishing numbers of computers and prevented certain companies from continuing with their services. Now, Honda was pushed into a corner and had no other choice but to stop production procedures in their factory for 48 hours, during which, development of a variety of machines was interrupted. The company has not provided detailed statements about why the shutdown was necessary, but we can presume that it was done to avoid any additional damage that the virus might have done. The nasty infection managed to affect more than one plant of Honda: other infected factories are found in North America, China and Europe.
The persistent nature of WannaCry clearly emphasizes the necessity for organizations to take advantage of security patches and apply them to their networks. Security researchers that investigated this attack guess that Honda might have left some gaps that WannaCry used for its operations to take place, but all of the theories are pretty speculative. For instance, one of the most presumable explanations of the outburst of this virus is that an employee of Honda brought a computer which was a carrier of a WannaCry infection. Once it went into offline mode and was connected to the network of the factory, the kill switch website was not able to launch which lead to the successful infiltration to other computers.
On the other hand, there were some concerns that a new sample of WannaCry has surfaced which is immune to the kill switch solution. This would be a very frightening incident as a world does not need a new wave of ransomware infections. However, activity of this ambitious crypto-virus was also detected in Australia when it managed to affect traffic cameras that were exploited to monitor drivers’ speeds and red-light cameras.
Even though the infection did not prevent cameras from functioning, they did turn off and turn on every five minutes. You would assume that maybe this will mean that speed-lovers would avoid getting speeding tickets, but the relevant authorities explained that there is no reason to ignore the caught culprits.
While the whole future of WannaCry still remains a mystery, we hope that people will update their operating systems so that a ransomware virus would not have favorable conditions to infiltrate into devices and encrypt data.
Source: scmagazine.com
