14 DAY TRIAL // The WannaCry ransomware has infected hundreds of thousands of Windows computers across the world, and as the world is recovering from this 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 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 outburst started last week.
Since more and more systems running older versions of Windows were infected, Microsoft decided to push an emergency patch for Windows XP and Windows Server 2003, urging users running any of these versions to deploy it as soon as possible to limit the impact of WannaCry.
Microsoft releases updates… for genuine Windows
There’s one big problem, though: users running pirated Windows could not install updates, no matter if we are talking about supported or unsupported versions of Windows. Even though there are ways to install the latest updates on copies of Windows that 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 an important share of computers are running pirated Windows, these are also the countries with the biggest rate of WannaCry infections, F-Secure says.
“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.