Massive outbreak of ransomware variant infects large amounts of computers around the world

Ransomware variant known as WanaCry is being spread on a massive scale around the world. It uses a recently patched vulnerability in the Windows SMB protocol. Microsoft has released a patch for this specific vulnerability (MS17-010) on March 14th 2017. Machines that have been patched are not vulnerable to the exploit, but could still be infected through other infection methods such as phishing e-mails. Fox-IT noticed that the malware had a hardcoded kill switch which could disable all functionality. This means anyone who received the actual phishing email but did not open it yet appears to have been saved.”]

Source: https://blog.fox-it.com/2017/05/12/massive-outbreak-of-ransomware-variant-infects-large-amounts-of-computers-around-the-world/