The WannaCry ransomware has already infected hundreds of thousands of Windows computers across the world, and as the world is recovering from fiasco, security experts are also looking into what caused so many systems to be compromised so fast.
In an analysis posted today, Finnish cybersecurity firm F-Secure explains that China and Russia are two of the countries most severely hit by WannaCry, and there’s a reason why this happened: the big number of computers running pirated Windows.
Microsoft had patched the vulnerability exploited in WannaCry attacks with the March 2017 Patch Tuesday cycle, so all systems running Windows 7, Windows 8.1, and Windows 10 were already secure when the WannaCry ransomware dropped bombs on unsuspecting systems last week.
Since increasing numbers of systems running older versions of Windows were affected, Microsoft had decided to push an emergency patch for Windows XP and Windows Server 2003, urging users to deploy the patch as soon as possible to limit the impact of WannaCry.
One of the major problems faced was users running on pirated versions of Windows were unable to install security updates. Even though there are ways to install the latest updates on updates on Windows which are not genuine, Microsoft is also implementing restrictions every once in a while, so depending on the release, it could be more or less difficult to patch a pirated Windows copy.
Since China and Russia are two of the countries where a major share of computers are running pirated Windows, these are also the countries with the biggest rate of WannaCry infections, as stated by F-Secure.
“The size of the outbreak is indicative of the number of machines out there which have not been patched with security updates. There could be three reasons for this – the patch was made available in March, but they haven’t installed it yet for some reason, they are using a pirated copy of Windows (and so don’t receive security updates that legitimate customers do) or they are running Windows XP which is no longer supported and doesn’t receive updates,” F-Secure says.
At this point, there are several ways to stay protected against WannaCry and similar forms of malware, but the most convenient, especially if you’re running genuine Windows, is to install the latest updates released by Microsoft. For users running pirated Windows, getting infected with WannaCry is just one of the risks they agree with when not getting a genuine license.
