NHS England hit by cyber attack, phone and IT systems down

satriales wrote:A security guy has found that by registering a certain domain he has activated a killswitch in this ransomware that stops further new cases.

What a hero!

Somebody Else's Problem wrote:

satriales wrote:A security guy has found that by registering a certain domain he has activated a killswitch in this ransomware that stops further new cases.

What a hero!

Yeah ive just been reading about it. You could imagine though him registering the domain and then an hour later security services kicking his door down thinking that he was responsible for the whole thing.

Hunt and May should be prosecuted over thier incompetence on this.

mcjihge2 wrote:Hunt and May should be prosecuted over thier incompetence on this.

Yeah, in 2015 the Conservatives cancelled a contract to keep the NHS computers up to date without replacing it with anything.
Labour run the Welsh NHS and have kept those NHS computers maintained so they weren't affected by this.

satriales wrote:

mcjihge2 wrote:Hunt and May should be prosecuted over thier incompetence on this.

Yeah, in 2015 the Conservatives cancelled a contract to keep the NHS computers up to date without replacing it with anything.
Labour run the Welsh NHS and have kept those NHS computers maintained so they weren't affected by this.

I did not know that.

Am I safe if I'm on a Mac?

The conclusion to BBC1 News was hilarious on this. "Basically, it's possible the computers will have gone very wrong."

It sounded like something out of The Day Today.

massimo wrote:

satriales wrote:

mcjihge2 wrote:Hunt and May should be prosecuted over thier incompetence on this.

Yeah, in 2015 the Conservatives cancelled a contract to keep the NHS computers up to date without replacing it with anything.
Labour run the Welsh NHS and have kept those NHS computers maintained so they weren't affected by this.

I did not know that.

Wow what a goldmine for labour. Surely they won't miss a trick on this. Sarcasm, sarcasm, sarcasm.

The tories would have been all over labour if this happened on their watch.

Return_of_the_STAR wrote:

massimo wrote:

satriales wrote:

mcjihge2 wrote:Hunt and May should be prosecuted over thier incompetence on this.

Yeah, in 2015 the Conservatives cancelled a contract to keep the NHS computers up to date without replacing it with anything.
Labour run the Welsh NHS and have kept those NHS computers maintained so they weren't affected by this.

I did not know that.

Wow what a goldmine for labour. Surely they won't miss a trick on this. Sarcasm, sarcasm, sarcasm.

The tories would have been all over labour if this happened on their watch.

Corbyn did mention it in a speech he made but most of the media selectively quoted from that speech and conveniently missed that part out.

satriales wrote:

Return_of_the_STAR wrote:

massimo wrote:

satriales wrote:

mcjihge2 wrote:Hunt and May should be prosecuted over thier incompetence on this.

Yeah, in 2015 the Conservatives cancelled a contract to keep the NHS computers up to date without replacing it with anything.
Labour run the Welsh NHS and have kept those NHS computers maintained so they weren't affected by this.

I did not know that.

Wow what a goldmine for labour. Surely they won't miss a trick on this. Sarcasm, sarcasm, sarcasm.

The tories would have been all over labour if this happened on their watch.

Corbyn did mention it in a speech he made but most of the media selectively quoted from that speech and conveniently missed that part out.

Yeah they will do this. I've nopined this over the past decade. But labour should keep pressing it, mentioned it at every available opportunity. It's like when the tories successfully managed to pin the world financial crisis onto labour and labour just sat there and took it. They didn't seem to fight back just sat there like naughty children being told off then a few years later they went along with it and tried to say that was the fault of the other labour guys not us. The tories are leaps and bounds ahead of them when it comes to things like this.

Sorry this has gone a bit off topic. I realised today at work how my forces computers all run Windows 7. I wonder how vulnerable they are to future attacks.

Green Gecko wrote:Am I safe if I'm on a Mac?

From this particular exploit, yes as it's a windows XP vulnerability. Who knows what other macOS based Zero days have been leaked from the NSA and are now out in the wild though.

How can I, a lowly Win10 Home prole, tell if my computer may be vulnerable to such nefarious shenanigans? The checker thingy says the OS is up-to-date, but I'm sure that's not the only metric.

Alvin Flummux wrote:How can I, a lowly Win10 Home prole, tell if my computer may be vulnerable to such nefarious shenanigans? The checker thingy says the OS is up-to-date, but I'm sure that's not the only metric.

Below is a link to the patch you'd need to stop from being vulnerable to this attack. It was released three months ago so you should be fine.

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/lib ... aa970312fc)(256380)(2459594)(TnL5HPStwNw-mC26Ai1RgPs8y1VWNfdDKw)()

lex-man wrote:

Alvin Flummux wrote:How can I, a lowly Win10 Home prole, tell if my computer may be vulnerable to such nefarious shenanigans? The checker thingy says the OS is up-to-date, but I'm sure that's not the only metric.

Below is a link to the patch you'd need to stop from being vulnerable to this attack. It was released three months ago so you should be fine.

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/lib ... aa970312fc)(256380)(2459594)(TnL5HPStwNw-mC26Ai1RgPs8y1VWNfdDKw)()

Would Windows Update have downloaded and installed it automatically?

Alvin Flummux wrote:

lex-man wrote:

Alvin Flummux wrote:How can I, a lowly Win10 Home prole, tell if my computer may be vulnerable to such nefarious shenanigans? The checker thingy says the OS is up-to-date, but I'm sure that's not the only metric.

Below is a link to the patch you'd need to stop from being vulnerable to this attack. It was released three months ago so you should be fine.

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/lib ... aa970312fc)(256380)(2459594)(TnL5HPStwNw-mC26Ai1RgPs8y1VWNfdDKw)()

Would Windows Update have downloaded and installed it automatically?

Yes.

lex-man wrote:

Alvin Flummux wrote:

lex-man wrote:

Alvin Flummux wrote:How can I, a lowly Win10 Home prole, tell if my computer may be vulnerable to such nefarious shenanigans? The checker thingy says the OS is up-to-date, but I'm sure that's not the only metric.

Below is a link to the patch you'd need to stop from being vulnerable to this attack. It was released three months ago so you should be fine.

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/lib ... aa970312fc)(256380)(2459594)(TnL5HPStwNw-mC26Ai1RgPs8y1VWNfdDKw)()

Would Windows Update have downloaded and installed it automatically?

Yes.

Oh thank strawberry float. I've been getting increasingly nervous about this lately.

Hopefully this mass attack is the last we see of its kind.

Win 10 isnt affected is it?

Gently-Parted Ringpiece wrote:Win 10 isnt affected is it?

Ive only read about xp being affected. What slightly confuses me is I though Microsoft discontinued supporting xp a year or more ago but I've read articles that Microsoft released a fix for this vulnerability 3 months ago and those systems affected simply hadn't updated to the latest patches. Does anyone know if that's correct?

Return_of_the_STAR wrote:

Gently-Parted Ringpiece wrote:Win 10 isnt affected is it?

Ive only read about xp being affected. What slightly confuses me is I though Microsoft discontinued supporting xp a year or more ago but I've read articles that Microsoft released a fix for this vulnerability 3 months ago and those systems affected simply hadn't updated to the latest patches. Does anyone know if that's correct?

General support for Windows XP was discontinued but companies could purchase ongoing support if they wanted, though it was expensive to do so, so new patches are still being developed for it.

I think Microsoft have now released a patch for this specific exploit for Windows XP/Server 2003 for everyone though.

Seems unclear if other operating systems may be affected or not, though you can secure yourself further by disabling SMB v1 (It amazes me Microsoft still have this enabled by default) as I believe that's required for the exploit. I think that newer operating systems (including Windows 10) were technically vulnerable, but only if you haven't patched since February.

https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/msr ... t-attacks/

Return_of_the_STAR wrote:

Gently-Parted Ringpiece wrote:Win 10 isnt affected is it?

Ive only read about xp being affected. What slightly confuses me is I though Microsoft discontinued supporting xp a year or more ago but I've read articles that Microsoft released a fix for this vulnerability 3 months ago and those systems affected simply hadn't updated to the latest patches. Does anyone know if that's correct?

The vulnerability that was used by this attacked was patched in March so it's possible to get this thing on all windows os's. Although if you have Windows 7/8 or 10 you should have already patched the vulnerability. Windows 10 wasn't specifically targeted by this Malware.

massimo wrote:

Green Gecko wrote:Am I safe if I'm on a Mac?

From this particular exploit, yes as it's a windows XP vulnerability. Who knows what other macOS based Zero days have been leaked from the NSA and are now out in the wild though.

Thanks. Would you recommend Linux?