"Wolf K" wrote:
> On 2017-05-15 16:17, FredW wrote:
>> On Mon, 15 May 2017 20:52:07 +0100, "Ant"  wrote:
>>> "FredW" wrote:
>>>> All those that replied have clearly no idea whatsoever of IT-matters.
>>>> They give only politically desirable answers (they think).
>>>
>>> Neither do the people running the affected networks and systems,
>>> apparently. They should be fired.
>>>
>>>> And this massive attack of ransomware was caused by the NSA and the USA.
>>>
>>> Not really. People (amd Microsoft) should have woken up in 2003 when
>>> the Sever Mesage Block (SMB) software listening on port 445 was first
>>> exploited by the Blaster worm. There is no reason for SMB to be
>>> listening for incoming internet connections and no excuse for not
>>> firewalling this port.
>>
>> Further reading showed me you are right.
>>
>> (ever more facts are appearing how this originated.)
>
> ... which support the conspiracy theory that the hole was deliberate,

Nonesense.

> or
> else knowledge of how to exploit it was deliberately withheld by the NSA.

That's true; and Microsoft are moaning about it. They should take a
good look at themselves. What the #### are they doing releasing sub-
standard network software which has had problems in the past and
should have been rigorously tested for security issues and any other
bugs by now.

> We live in interesting times. So who pronounced the curse?

We live in an age of ####wit software developers and idiot internet
users. I am constantly amazed at the number of vulnerabilities patched
every month, not only on Windows and multi-platform stuff like Java and
Adobe's offerings but for many Linux distributions also. After all
these years since the first internet worm you'd think by now they'd
have given some importance to decent software testing. You might also
think that, since ransomware is not something new, users would have
figured out that backing up data is a good idea - but no, the twits
are still paying the ransom in some cases.


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