• The original WannaCry does NOT infect Windows XP boxes

    Posted on May 19, 2017 at 08:00 CDT by • Comment in the Forums

    I’ve been saying that for a week now – sometimes fighting over it.

    I’m not saying the EternalBlue infection method doesn’t work on XP. (Sorry for the double negative.) What I am saying is that no Windows XP boxes were infected, in the wild, by the original WannaCry worm.

    I’m also saying that the original WannaCry worm is now a distant memory, with much nastier things to come, and you have to get yourself patched, no matter which version of Windows you’re using.

    There’s an interesting debate going on right now about infections on XP boxes that weren’t part of the first wave.

    UPDATE: The Scottish National Health Service reports that 1,500 computers came down with WannaCry. Independently, NHS says they still have 6,500 computers running XP. Somehow that’s getting reported in the press that 1,500 XP NHS computers were infected. The announcement from NHS is apparently correct. The poorly-spun media reports are clearly wrong.

    ANOTHER UPDATE: Catalin Cimpanu at BleepingComputer comes to the conclusion that we’ve known all along — WannaCry only infects Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2, which is basically the same thing as Windows 7.

    The Kaspersky graph shows a tiny, tiny number of Win10 machines infected. My guess is that’s either a false positive, or from people who were intentionally infecting Win7 machines running in a Virtual Machine on Win10.

    There’s a commenter (I know, I shouldn’t read the comments) who says:

    You want to know why Windows 10 was on the list?
    I blame Microsoft for still allowing people to opt-out of auto-updates. The mass do not always know what’s best for them, so it is our responsibility to firmly reject their demand when it’s harmful, and educate them why so.

    I could pull my hair out. Win10 wasn’t directly affected. Opting in or out of updates isn’t a problem – although if you opted out of Win7 auto updates and you didn’t check for two months, yep, you could’ve gotten stung. But Win10? Puh-lease.

    Windows Patches/Security ,
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