Security, Spoken

Since the WannaCry ransomware ripped through the internet late last week, infecting hundreds of thousands of machines and locking up critical systems from healthcare to transportation, cryptographers have searched for a cure. Finding a flaw in WannaCry’s encryption scheme, after all, the could decrypt all those systems without any ransom. Now one French researcher says he’s foundat least a hint of a very limited remedy.

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Monday night, a suicide bomber took the lives of at least 22 people—including an 8-year-old girl—at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, England. Almost instantly, images and video of the devastating attack overtook Twitter timelines and Facebook News Feeds. As natural and understandable a response to horrific events that might be, it also threatens to amplify the chaos that terrorists intend.

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Over the past year, two digital disasters have rocked the internet. The botnet known as Mirai knocked a swath of major sites off the web last September, including Spotify, Reddit, and the New York Times. And over the past week, the WannaCry ransomware outbreak crippled systems ranging from healthcare to transportation in 150 countries before it an unlikely “kill-switch” in its code shut it down.

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For anyone growing weary of the constant focus on Russian and President Donald Trump's campaign, good news! A fresh horror took the spotlight late last week in the form of WannaCry, a vicious ransomware whose creators appear not to have been all that smart. WannaCry, we learned, features a built-in "kill switch" that security researchers have used to, well, kill it, at least for now. Some people on XP and Windows 7 might even be able to get their files back.

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This week, Disney CEO Bob Iger reportedly revealed to employees that a hacker had stolen the new Pirates of the Caribbean movie, and threatened to release it if the Mouse House doesn’t pay a hefty ransom. But Disney, which has enlisted the FBI’s help, says it won’t pay to keep its billion-dollar franchise under wraps. It’s just the latest in a string of high-profile extortion hacks that didn’t pan out. A few weeks ago, Netflix faced a similar threat.

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Today, Chelsea Manning walked out of the military prison that held her for seven years, and into a world largely remade by her actions. “Whatever is ahead of me is far more important than the past. I’m figuring things out right now—which is exciting, awkward, fun, and all new for me,” she said in a statement through her ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio. Manning marked the occasion with a photo of her first steps of freedom on Instagram, an app that launched in 2010.

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On October 19, 1973, Nick Akerman and his fellow Watergate investigators began hoarding whatever documents they could from the office of the special prosecutor, Archibald Cox. They knew that the next day, Cox planned to disobey President Richard Nixon and announce before a clutch of reporters at the National Press Club that he would pursue taped recordings from inside the Oval Office; they also knew that in doing so, Cox was risking his job and the fate of the investigation.

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As a vicious new strain of ransomware swept the UK’s National Health Service yesterday, shutting off services at hospitals and clinics throughout the region, experts cautioned that the best protection was to download a patch Microsoft had issued in March. The only problem? A reported 90 percent of NHS systems run Windows XP, an operating system Microsoft first introduced in 2001, and hasn’t supported since 2014.

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There are no quiet weeks in security these days, but the firing of FBI Director James Comey made this one particularly loud. President Trump's controversial dismissal won't slow down the investigation into his campaign's alleged ties with Russia, and it occurred with no apparent replacement lined up. And that's just for starters. Those worried about whether Comey's files are safe can rest easy—it's not like they were in a cardboard box.

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On Friday night, security researcher Tavis Ormandy of Google’s Project Zero announced on Twitter that he had found a Windows bug. Well, not just any bug. It was “crazy bad,” Ormandy wrote. “The worst Windows remote code exec in recent memory.” By Monday night, Microsoft had released an emergency patch, along with details of what the vulnerability entailed. And yes, it was every bit as scary as advertised.

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