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by roblabla 2227 days ago
We're talking about WannaCry here. It's a ransomware that already more or less nukes the host system. It encrypts the files with strong encryption, which is the same as shredding them if you don't have the ransom money. Sure, the malware author could go further and harm the system physically (e.g. forcefully overheat the CPU or something), but that's actually surprisingly hard to do reliably ^^.

Besides, history tells us that those malwares won't really have such "nuking" functionality. Gating it on the presence of a server is ridiculous, and would be found out eventually when the virus runs in a weird environment where, for instance, every DNS queries resolve (e.g. hotel WiFi).