Many security researchers, including the cyber firm Symantec , as well as the British government, have already concluded that North Korea was likely behind the WannaCry attack, which quickly unfurled across the globe in May to infect more than 300,000 computers in 150 countries.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"http:\/\/citifmonline.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/12\/Reuters1.jpg\")
Considered unprecedented in scale at the time, WannaCry knocked British hospitals offline, forcing thousands of patients to reschedule appointments and disrupted infrastructure and businesses around the world.<\/p>\n
The attack originally looked like a ransomware campaign, where hackers encrypt a targeted computer and demand payment to recover files. Some experts later concluded the ransom threat may have been a distraction intended to disguise a more destructive intent.<\/p>\n
FedEx\u2019s computer networks were among the most heavily hit. The international shipper said in September it expected to sustain a $300 million profit hit as a result of the attack.<\/p>\n Some researchers have said they believed WannaCry was deployed accidentally by North Korea as hackers were developing the code. The senior administration official declined to comment about whether U.S. intelligence was able to discern if the attack was deliberate.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat we see is a continued pattern of North Korea misbehaving, whether destructive cyber attacks, hacking for financial gain, or targeting infrastructure around the globe,\u201d the official said.<\/p>\n WannaCry was made possible by a flaw in Microsoft\u2019s Windows software, which was discovered by the U.S. National Security Agency and then used by the NSA to build a hacking tool for its own use.<\/p>\n In a devastating NSA security breach, that hacking tool and others were published online by the Shadow Brokers, a mysterious group that regularly posts cryptic taunts toward the U.S. government.<\/p>\n The fact that WannaCry was made possible by the NSA led to sharp criticism from Microsoft President Brad Smith and others who believe the NSA should disclose vulnerabilities it finds so that they can be fixed, rather then hoarding that knowledge to carry out attacks.<\/p>\n Smith said WannaCry provided \u201cyet another example of why the stockpiling of vulnerabilities by governments is such a problem.\u201d<\/p>\n U.S. officials have pushed back on those assertions, saying the administration discloses most computer flaws that government agencies detect.<\/p>\n Last month, the White House published its rules for deciding whether to disclose cyber security flaws or keep them secret as part of an effort to be more transparent about the inter-agency process involved in weighing disclosure.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Trump administration has publicly blamed North Korea for unleashing the so-called WannaCry cyber attack that crippled hospitals, banks and other companies across the globe earlier this year. \u201cThe attack was widespread and cost billions, and North Korea is directly responsible,\u201d Tom Bossert, homeland security adviser to President Donald Trump, wrote in a piece published […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":384524,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[107],"tags":[7105,160,594],"yoast_head":"\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/citifmonline.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/12\/Reuters2.jpg\")