At least cryptocurrency has removed most of the creativity from script kiddies - there's so many more interesting things you could do than just mine coins.
Yeah, exactly. It’s almost like a bounty for find a vuln. It seems to be a mostly harmless attack that doesn’t cause global internet grief like a DDoS or something.
WannaCry’s very public global ransom brought attention to a Monero mining botnet which was using the same exploit for weeks beforehand, it was making $40,000 per day. It made much more than WannaCry and its operators are still unknown and would have been able to cash out
Script kiddies are just annoying and their actions resulted in the patch killing that silent mining botnet as well.