Not that it exonerates them whatsoever, but these kinds of attacks (including Wana Cryptor) usually aren't tailored for hospitals or any particular institution. They just harvest as many email addresses as they can (from leaks and purchased lists from spammers, etc.) and try to get as many infections as possible.
Hospitals just happened to be disproportionately affected by this attack because a lot of them have ineffective IT departments/mangement and never applied the MS17-010 patch.
Of course, these people are still felons and are likely responsible for millions of lost family photos, work and school documents, etc. They just aren't going out of their way to target hospitals.
I understand what you're trying to say, but think about what happens when the military strikes a hospital and calls it "collateral damage." While you're correct that these people probably did not intend to damage hospitals, they could have reasonably foreseen that an indiscriminate attack on computer networks around the globe would have deleterious effects on essential infrastructure.
This means that they knowingly or with reckless negligence unleashed such an attack on the world. If they had been more "scrupulous" criminals, they would have more narrowly tailored their attack on targets they believed deserved to be extorted or where such extortion would not interfere with life critical systems.
I'm not a lawyer, but if they were a nation state, I believe they would have violated the Geneva Convention's prohibition on attacking hospitals.
That said, I think this attack gives more weight to NSA critics that contend that their exploit research should be focused more on defense rather than offensive capabilities. Their carelessness combined with another group wanting to embarrass them is what allowed this indiscriminate attack to be inflicted on civilian infrastructure.
When it comes to military/state objectives that the public poorly understands the risk scenario is quite different.
Which is why we're currently in a situation where zero-days that NSA easily knew would be leaked were not patched at least a month ahead of time were left unpatched. The costs aren't significant enough to motivate them to respond to their failures.
People like to blame the capitalistic incentives for not upgrading from Windows XP but to me the failure to respond to this obvious outcome of the leaking of NSA malware is far more insidious. These sys-admins managing old systems were not prepared for state-financed malware to be released to C-level cyber criminals as a 'threat-actor'.
The poor state of corporate information security has been exposed in the last few days, but even that sorry state is nothing compared to the failed responsibility of the US government to value their citizens over internal objectives. Which is increasingly a common narrative that is a unsurprisingly a result of the unencumbered growth of the security state and by proxy the executive branch whom they ultimately report to.
The hospital really needs to move the patients out immediately if the local military starts military operations from within hospital (which is basically a war crime).
Then, if the commanders force patients to stay by threat of violence to stay as human shields, that's a further war crime. The responsibility of casualties here is more with those using patients like this, than anyone else.
I believe many in the military would simple say that Total War doctrine, present since perhaps the US Civil War and definitely by World War I, would argue bombing patents to get at command-and-control would be acceptable during times of war.
Now before everyone buries me, total war is a rather rare military state, and probably only present a select few times in the 20th century.
About one million Germans were dead or wounded as a result of allied bombing. Almost certainly entire hospitals were blown up too, in Dresden if nothing else.
A small prize to pay for not having nazies stomp around my backyard (almost literally, there are remnants of a nazi bunker not half a mile from where I live).
Area bombing was largely ineffective and German production increased during the heaviest periods. In the view of many, it was a crime committed by a vindictive group of criminals. Area bombing has some well documented cases of slowing down the fall of nazis (hindering troop advances, taking away a lot of war production resources etc) but little evidence of speeding up the end.
True of this attack, but ransomware attacks targeted specifically against hospitals have been booming over the past year or two. Aside from poor IT, hospitals often need immediate access to that data to treat patients, which makes them much more likely to pay. Which also means they generally ask for more than 300 dollars - that's the real proof that NHS was just collateral damage.
Until today, there was nothing to apply if your computers were running XP or 2003. Guess which Windows versions are the most popular in UK hospitals? So I think your sentence should read like "Hospitals just happened to be disproportionately affected by this attack because they were forced to trust Microsoft would never put corporate profit before social responsibility."
What news reports said anything about legacy hardware? The BBC and Reuters articles claimed the NHS suffered infection of their patient records servers and their reception computers.
Apparently the impacted XP and 2003 machines were accessing the same disk servers as the patient record systems. Thus an infected CAT scanner controller (or whatever) was able to destroy the patient records.
That doesn't tell a story of missing money or maintenance contracts. It tells of poor or even irresponsible and incompetent deployment procedures.
You shouldn't allow your CAT scanner to write over your patient records at a server. You shouldn't even have them in the same network segment.
And on legacy software. My NHS Trust seems to have escaped unscathed, but it has software that won't run on modern systems which is why XP is still seen in most departments.
What software is that? There is a 32-bit version of Windows 10, which can still run 16-bit Windows/DOS programs, and IE11 still supports ActiveX, Silverlight, Java applets and even (in IE10 compatibility mode) VBScript.
So AFAICT 32-bit W10 can run most anything 32-bit XP can (likewise the 64-bit versions, though neither can run 16-bit programs), and IE11 can run most anything IE8 can (with minor configuration).
Is it software that relies on undocumented APIs? (I can't imagine why hospital software would require exotic methods of poking at the kernel or hardware).
XP has been unsupported for over three years and 2003 for nearly two years. Still using them at this point is gross negligence on the part of the hospitals.
>Still using them at this point is gross negligence
I'd guess that most hospitals don't do in-house development for the software they use. They paid someone else for it, probably at "enterprise" rates; it's hard to blame them for not having the budget or desire to replace working systems with new shiny (complete with new bugs) every X years.
Sigh, we need to fix the software economy. Imagine if the software being used by hospitals and other public institutions was open source as a rule. Then maybe it could actually be reused and collaborated on instead of rotting away with the need of replacing it all when it's just not usable any more.
This thread seems to be a series of "well, they had to make this error because previously they had made this other error"... presumably this can go on ad naseum, but isn't the eventual resolution going to be "spend money to install current hardware and software"? They could have done that at any point in the past. Complicated etiologies for broken systems, miss the forest for the trees.
...are how the state-of-the-art is advanced in other industries? Imagine if the FAA's response to an air disaster was, "Never mind root causes, you just should've bought a newer plane".
Back in the late 90's the government of the time split the NHS into Trusts and outsourced the IT to the likes of ICL (not sure who does it now). With that the last time any major overhaul was done upon the hardware and software was Y2K and as with most outsourced IT contracts it focused upon support from a reaction basis and not a proactive one.
With that the GSN (Government Secure Network) is still a good ring-fence (that's outsourced as well) but once something gets inside, boom.
Now with the Trusts - they do have a local IT bod and in the cases I dealt with, somebody who knew how a PC works and enthusiastic, which is nice but also dangerous and I had to deal with a few issues that were as I call them "enthusiastically driven". As such you have all these Trusts operating at some level as independants and with varity of results.
One case, was one `IT manager` at a Trust who was posting on a alt.ph.uk (UK hacking usenet group) and offering up inside information about how they operated. That did not happen as the alt.ph.uk lot are a moral ethical lot and health services are taboo, so was rightly shot down and equally the chap was soon in talks with security services.
But with so many legacy systems, and an event driven support mentality (again Y2K being an exception) then such events can and will happen. Sadly many trusts lack provision to handle such issues and as with many IT area's are event driven instead of being proactive. Indeed ITIL the golden managment love-in solution for support management is event-driven and many an implementation ticks all the ITIL boxes of compliance and yet still lack proactive support. This alas is mostly gets compared to firefighters pouring water on buildings so they won't catch fire and sadly pretty darn systemic in many an organization.
With that the best anybody in IT can do it to flag up an issue in a documented way to cover there ass then the outlined event does transpire to prevent unfair scapegoating. A sad situation of which many of not all IT support staff in all capacities can attest too.
Ironicaly DOS based legacy systems with no networking and exitic ISA cards in some equally over-priced hardware still work and the need to replace them does become moot, alas that example gets projected upon other systems that are networked. But the whole health industry has many legacy setup's that are expensive to replace, more so if they work and the motivation to limit potential damage from future events above and beyond backup's becomes a management issue that lacks a voice for budgets.
But making BTC hard to cash out is a hard problem. Although particular addresses can be blacklisted, mixing services are now mainstream. Some return fresh BTC from miners. Even so, it's problematic to mix humongous quantities. For example, the Sheep Marketplace owner/thief overwhelmed Bitcoin Fog with 10^5 BTC. The trail went dead after that, but he got busted while cashing out. His girlfriend was receiving huge international wire transfers, and could not explain where the money was coming from.
It probably originated in Russia or one of the other cybercrime-heavy ex-Soviet states (Ukraine, Belarus, etc), so outside the jurisdiction of UK authorities. Although this time it appears to have done most of its damage in Russia, so the perpetrators might not benefit from the usual blind eye.
I've seen ransomware that explicitly tried to avoid hospitals, schools, government, etc., so there's that. I always assumed it was out of self interest though.
Hospitals just happened to be disproportionately affected by this attack because a lot of them have ineffective IT departments/mangement and never applied the MS17-010 patch.
Of course, these people are still felons and are likely responsible for millions of lost family photos, work and school documents, etc. They just aren't going out of their way to target hospitals.