May 12th, 2017. A quiet Friday turned into a global IT nightmare.
A fast-spreading ransomware worm — later named WannaCry — tore through systems across 150 countries, locking down over 200,000 computers in a matter of hours.
Hospitals. Railways. Telecoms. Banks. Governments. All paralyzed.
WannaCry didn’t rely on social engineering or phishing. It used EternalBlue — an exploit developed by the U.S. NSA to spy on adversaries.
But EternalBlue wasn’t kept under lock and key.
It was stolen. Leaked. Weaponized.
By a mysterious group called The Shadow Brokers.
The exploit targeted outdated Windows systems — many of which had already received a patch from Microsoft weeks earlier. But unpatched machines in hospitals and government agencies were sitting ducks.
Once infected, users were met with this cold message:
"Oops, your files have been encrypted! Send $300 in Bitcoin within 3 days, or lose everything."
Even those who paid often got nothing in return. No keys. No data. No mercy.
In the UK, the National Health Service was crippled.
A single malware worm turned one of the world’s largest healthcare systems into digital rubble.
According to U.S. and UK intelligence, The Lazarus Group — a state-backed North Korean hacking unit — was behind the attack.
Was WannaCry an experiment that spiraled out of control?
Or was it intentional digital chaos?
The truth is still… encrypted.
A 22-year-old British researcher, Marcus Hutchins (aka MalwareTech), unintentionally discovered a hidden domain in WannaCry’s code.
Registering that domain triggered a kill switch, halting its spread.
A single domain name saved the internet.
WannaCry was a wake-up call no one could hit snooze on.
It showed how:
WannaCry wasn’t just ransomware — it was a warning siren for the digital age.
What happens when the next cyber weapon doesn’t come with a kill switch?
That’s a question the world is still trying to answer.
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