5 Security Lessons WannaCry Taught Us

There is a lot more our industry should be doing to protect its systems and data from cyber blackmail.

The scope and severity of the fallout from the WannaCry attacks over the past week elicits plenty of "we told you so" head shakes about the dangers of ransomware. With a lightning-fast speed, the blackmail worm spread quickly.

According to Europol, the attack had reached about 150 countries and more than 200,000 systems. When security researchers found a kill-switch for the attack that they used to their advantage, it didn't take long for new variants to start up again with infections occurring at a rate of 3,600 systems per hour.

It was a nasty bit of business and while the hue and cry over ransomware shouldn’t be ignored, there are a lot more valuable lessons beyond those that have to do with cyber blackmail. Here are just a few of them.

1: Vulnerability and Patch Management overshadows everything

Patch, patch and patch. It's been the overwhelming mantra of security pros for decades, and this attack campaign shows us why. The rapid spread of the worm was made possible by the ubiquity of systems worldwide running on unsupported or unpatched operating systems.
Hopefully, after this attack, organizations will significantly alter their continuous patch hygiene. Microsoft also released new emergency patches for Windows XP and 2003, even though it has stopped all security updates and technical support for XP since April 2014, which simply shows the seriousness of the attack and the risk of deploying out-of-date operating systems in work environments."

2: Unknown Assets can cause you so much problems

It's just about impossible to patch systems an organization doesn't even know exists. The insidious effects of WannaCry offer up a good illustration of how easy it is for attackers to scale attacks against the forgotten systems that can be lost through inconsistent asset management.
"Attackers performing reconnaissance will often find unknown, unprotected, and unmonitored assets to use as attack vectors," says Steve Ginty, senior product manager at RiskIQ. "For a large enterprise, these types of assets are typically easy for even novice hackers and threat groups to find, and because they’re unmonitored, they provide an easy way in and out. To defend yourself, you need to know what attackers see when they’re looking at your business from outside the firewall."

3: Network Segmentation Can Be a Valuable Risk Reducer

Of course, patch management isn't as simple as just finding every system and waving a magic wand over them. Many organizations struggle to update legacy and embedded systems due to a host of technical problems. It's why WannaCry found such fertile ground in healthcare organizations, since many medical devices are built on top of old Windows operating systems that are very difficult to update due to government regulations and the organizations' own concerns about causing system disruptions during updates. We all have faced challenge(s) while updating our work and personal devices at one point or the other.
"In many cases, devices will never receive updates either because the OS is no longer supported and memory, storage, and processing constraints may prevent the device from operating effectively with the latest software. Finally, I suspect that many hospital administrators may not recognize the danger from using outdated software on these devices, and simply avoid patching because the device works. Thus 'if it ain’t broke, don’t try to fix it' mentality can be tremendously detrimental to hospital security."
This scenario is a perfect example of how compensating controls - like network segmentation - should have kicked in for a lot of organizations.
"Of course, today, completely disconnecting a machine from the Internet typically renders it of little use. But network connectivity can be limited as much as possible," says Brighten Godfrey, co-founder and CTO of Veriflow. "Segmentation requires careful network architecture, especially in a complex environment where configurations of firewalls, routers and other devices are continually changing. Rigorous network verification methods can help ensure that the intended segmentation is continually realized."

4: Security Has Real-World Repercussions

Speaking of healthcare, one of the big-picture lessons that security professionals around the world should be thinking deeply about is the fact that cybersecurity is no longer just a game of protecting data. When attacks happen today, they have real-world repercussions that can affect the safety of people's life and limb.
"With so many medical devices connected to the internet, it’s not surprising to know that some of these devices were rendered useless by WannaCry," says Terry Ray, chief product strategist for Imperva.
The attacks against the UK's National Health Service put hospital operations at a standstill and threatened the health of real people. As much as the security industry talks about its struggle with attackers as a game, using terminology like "whack-a-mole" and "cat-and-mouse" to describe the back-and-forth exchanges, the truth that WannaCry should bring home is that what we're engaged in is not frivolous or fun. The consequences are real and serious.

5: It's Easy to Forget the 'A' in Security's 'CIA'

So many security organizations get hung up on the confidentiality and integrity part of IT risk management that they forget the final leg of that three-legged stool: availability. According to estimates from Cyence researchers, the business interruption costs to companies from WannaCry will add up to over $8 billion.
"Business interruption caused by the WannaCry malware is probably the most substantial and problematic component to this event. Organizations will suffer interruptions to their business, lost income, and extra expenses while the infection is being remediated – and it will take some time to get back to full productivity even after systems are restored.
Obviously, these are big-picture lessons. And it will take time to turn these lessons into meaningful action. In the meantime, for those who've found they've lost access to their WindowsXP systems, there's at least some good news on that front. Security researchers with the French security firm Quarkslab have released a tool called Wannakey, which can help recover the private encryption key for infected WindowsXP systems.