On May 12, 2017, hundreds of thousands of computers worldwide were targeted by the infamous WannaCry attack. Would it have been possible to avoid it by means other than installing a patch to the affected Windows operating systems? Can similar situations be prevented rather than cured? Security researchers from the IMDEA Software Institute explore in this document what cutting-edge computer science can do now and what could be done in the future.
On the WannaCry ransomware attack: could it have been avoided?