Welcome to HakProof.com. This site is my attempt to reach out beyond the physical classroom to the community at large to help each of you increase your personal SQ or Security Quotient. Today was my eleventh visit to WHTC 1450 AM radio station in Holland Michigan to be a guest on the daily show, Talk of the Town.
Click on Link to access the Podcast, of my time on today’s show:
http://whtc.com/podcasts/talk-of-the-town-today/99/wannacry-and-beyond-james-allen-may-24/
Twitter Policy update
- Information about when you visit twitter are being stored longer. From 10 to 30 days.
- Changes are being made how and what type of aggregated information is bein shared with their business partners.
- Twitter will now ignore the Do Not Track option available in most browsers. This is not as big a deal as it sounds since very few if any sites honor the setting.
- Twitter has added personalized advertising. The change the way Twitter handles advertising you need to customize your accounts settings.
- To read more and see how to access and make changes to twitter, log into your twitter account and then click on the link in the title for more information.
WannaCry Overview
- WannaCry, spelling may vary, is a fast spreading piece of Malware that utilizes leaked NSA 0-day exploits to gain access to networks and spread without the help of human interaction, a.k.a a worm.
- Once WannaCry infects a machine it completes a few different tasks, non-good.
- Spends the first 24 hours seeking out, and attacking other computers on the network to infect.
- Encrypting user data and holding it for a ransom, to be paid in bitcoin
- Installs a backdoor on the computer to allow hackers to gain access to the machine anytime they want in the future.
- Most of the WannaCry infections occurred in Russia and China, due to a large number of unpatched pirated copies of Windows, but many other countries were also hit, including the U.S. with around a thousand reported infections.
- Windows 7 was the hardest hit by this infection, though that does not mean that other operating systems were immune.
- Microsoft released a patch for the primary vulnerability that was exploited in March, but due to many people’s reluctance or inability to install updates WannaCry still had devastating effects.
- If you are still using XP or Windows 7 make sure you update the operating system (OS) with the patches that Microsoft recently made available for the unsupported OS’. Check out this Youtube video help manually updating your OS.
- If you have been infected, your data may be recovered under very restrictive circumstances.
- No one has taken responsibility for these infections, but there are accusations and rumors flying around. Putin says the U.S. Created it and a number of security researchers believe that WannaCry has ties to North Korea, though definitive proof is still lacking.
- Check out the WanaCry FAQ link in the title for more information.