Takeaways from a global malware disaster

Posted May 18, 2017 9:59 UTC (Thu) by NAR (subscriber, #1313)
In reply to: Takeaways from a global malware disaster by fratti
Parent article: Vulnerability hoarding and Wcry

"no excuse for anyone running Windows 7 to get affected by this exploit, but people did."

Not much of an excuse, but pirated (non-activated) copies of Windows 7 might not be able to get updated.

Takeaways from a global malware disaster

Posted May 20, 2017 13:35 UTC (Sat) by biergaizi (subscriber, #92498) [Link] (1 responses)

Most pirated copies of Windows have their activation system cracked, running Windows Update is not a problem at all.

I believe most Windows users see security updates as annoyance, even if Windows Update itself is reliable. Patches pop up every several days and strongly pushes the users to update, and users who don't understand the value of security updates just hate it... Large organizations also disable updates to ensure the consistency of their system, and prevents updates to interrupt their workflow.

Takeaways from a global malware disaster

Posted May 20, 2017 21:59 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

I think technically aware users see security updates as an annoyance. The rest have no idea Windows Update exists at all, overlook the nag notifications (they don't pop up for very long and are easy to overlook, particularly if you're not at the machine when they appear) and think "why is my machine rebooting on its own? is it broken?". I know several people who took machines to the shop for "repair" (and were charged for it) when the only problem was Windows Update autoreboots.

Takeaways from a global malware disaster

Posted May 21, 2017 16:45 UTC (Sun) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link]

I think the multi-month siege of increasingly hostile Windows 10 upgrade attempts has left most surviving Windows 7 PCs in a state of “updates forcibly disabled, to the maximum extent possible”. Although the initial danger passed most of those people wouldn't have bothered to re-enable updates, and that's probably the main reason this worm hit as hard as it did.