Cyber Attack Warning

Not at all Cyberwasp, the more people who know there is a threat the quicker it can be brought under control. I think the good news from this is the people who did it haven't made that much money. It's possible to track the volume of trading in Bitcoin and in the UK yesterday they estimate only £20,000 has been paid in ransom. It's a bit sad that the tool they used came from the National Security Agency in America, although it was stolen in a separate hack , but on the other hand the fact Russia is the worst affected country might remind Mr Putin that two can play at cyber espionage when necessary.

yes I think the main problem has occurred with unpatched systems. Would you believe some of the National Health Service hospitals in the UK still use Windows XP which is full of holes. It's easy to criticise but they have a lot of very expensive  bespoke software that refuses to run on later versions of Windows. By expensive I mean costing 5 or 6 billion pounds-so they can't simply dump it. A friend of mine had an appointment at St Bartholemews in London yesterday and got turned away because without the computers up and running the haematology department couldn't print out labels for the blood specimen bottles-a crazy over dependence on automation in my opinion. I find Microsoft Outlook very good at separating out real email from spam and attempts to break into your system. Unless you click on the junk folder you simply never see it.

Hi Ronald,

I probably shouldn't bring up this sort of thing in the forum , but this seems to be a particularly serious attack. Apparently the British Prime Minister is making a statement later and that's unheard of for this kind of thing. If a few people avoid problems I therefore think it's worth posting.