“WannaCry” Ransomware: Who is Affected and Why

Ransomware has shown its most threatening side,since the last Friday, as “WannaCry”. Now the question that is doing the rounds all over the internet and personal lobbies is how big this malicious program is and who’s affected and why.

Well, let’s first talk about how gruesome the numbers are. As per the latest report, it has already affected as big as 200,000 people and organizations spread across 150 different countries. The sudden ghastly appearance of the nasty software has made everyone from service sector, manufacturing, public administration, finance to real estate and wholesale trade to suffer big time with ransomware.

Here’s what global companies said:

FedEx: “Experiencing interference with some of our Windows-based systems caused by malware.”

Nissan: “Some Nissan entities were recently targeted” but “there has been no major impact on our business.”

Deutsche Bahn: “Passenger information displays in some stations were inoperative” as were “some ticket machines.”

As per the data by Symantec it is claimed that every few years in the recent times industries have been regularly suffering the threats from ransomware. However, the degree of vulnerability of companies to such threats decides how prone they are to extortion for money for data.

Talking of that, it was revealed (in another study conducted in 2016) that companies belonging to the service sector are affected the most by ransomware.

Another data provided by Datto reveals that of the most recorded reasons as to why such attacks succeed the most common is the human blunders making such threats possible. And this counts at all levels from opening a suspicious email to not using strong passwords and other different things in between and beyond. On a positive note, however, most of the affected companies are coming over it. And those who want to bargain protections from such attacks, they can evade these by keeping software and anti-virus up-to-date.

Image source: statista.com