Defense & Intelligence Policy, Business and Technology

Is NSA to blame for global WannaCry cyberattack?

Federal Times: The WannaCry cyberattack has by now been extensively quantified, with metrics ranging from total infected computers and the speed of its spread to the financial profit and news headlines with bad puns it generated.

Another metric increasing daily is the number of people asking who’s ultimately responsible for the largest ransomware attack in history. Central to answering that question is a tedious analysis of factors that enabled the ransomware’s development and potentially accelerated its distribution.

So far, experts and observers have cast blame, in full or in part, on factors ranging from, in no particular order, victim organizations’ poor cybersecurity hygiene, Microsoft, the NSA, the Shadow Brokers and North Korea-linked Lazarus Group. There are undoubtedly more. A few have observed it’s not so much one or two factors, but rather the concurrence of many or all of these factors that contributed to a perfect storm.

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