The South Korea consumer electronics company, LG is the latest victim of WannaCry ransomware attack. According to tech new sites, the attack occurred in one of the self-service kiosks in South Korea and the company had to shut off some of the systems in order to forestall its spread.
The infection found on the self-service kiosk was found to be a similar malware to the one that used a leaked NSA exploit in order to spread around the world in May of this year.
In May, the ransomware infected over 300,000 Windows-based systems and brought many networks to their knees. Some of the biggest organizations including Honda and NHS were forced to go offline. A kill switch was found by the security researcher, Marcus Hutchins and prevented the spread of the malware. Microsoft released an emergency patch that protected systems from being infected. The ransomware continued to infect unpatched systems.
LG later released a statement that confirmed that no data was lost and no ransom was paid. It seems that LG did not patch all their systems to prevent the attack. It is believed that the malware exploited the vulnerability of Windows Server Message Block (SMB) via networking protocol to spread through the network
How do you protect your computer from the attack?
Ransomware; Be careful on the emails
Over 40 percent of the attacks are made on email or phishing scams. Phishing emails are very good at getting the respondents to click that link because the attackers usually mask their intentions. It is healthy to have every email scanned by anti-virus software. Moreover, do not ignore when Gmail warns against opening any mail. There could be malware.
The old passwords still work
Most of the people do not like the hassle that goes with the passwords. However, passwords are a great weapon for fighting off the attackers. After a few months, the passwords should be changed entirely (not just a single or a few characters)
Keep your OS updated
Wannacry and Petya used vulnerabilities of the PCs whose OS was not updated. New updates are released from time to cover the holes and other vulnerabilities that may be used to attack your computers. Ensure that you update your system as soon as the patches are released. With Windows 10, these updates will install automatically. However, you have to switch them on for older versions.
Every company is being hit with malware. it will never stop