Short Bytes: It might have been a month since we first heard about WannaCry, but the ransomware is still making news every now and then. WannaCry recently brought production in a Honda Car Plant in Japan to a halt. Moreover, according to a report, around 5.5 million devices are still vulnerable to WannaCry.
The production lines at Honda’s Sayama plant in Japan where Accord, Odyssey Minivan, and Step Wagon vehicles are manufactured, hasn’t moved an inch, the company said on Wednesday.
The shutdown happened after the car makers realized that the WannaCry Ransomware which targets Windows machines had entered the computer network of the plant, which has a daily output of 1000 cars.
The one-day halt was pulled off on Tuesday. A company spokesperson told Reuters that the production in Honda’s other facilities wasn’t affected.
As is already known, the WannaCry ransomware is assumed to be the brainchild of a Korean hacker group which used the NSA-related tools released by Shadow Brokers. The infamous ransomware even became an inspiration to an Android malware called WannaLocker.
More than 5.5 million devices are still vulnerable to WannaCry
According to Rapdi7’s 2017 National Exposure Index report, obtained by Data Center Knowledge, more than 5.5 million machines have an open file-sharing SMB port 445. The same is used by the cruel WannaCry to infect Windows PCs. SMB (Server Message Block) is an application layer protocol which allows devices to share files and printers over a network.
Out of the 5.5 million machines, around 800,000 machines have been identified to be running the Windows operating system. Also, the number of open SMB ports has escalated since last year, when it was recorded at 4.6 million.
Overall, the report includes stats of over 3 billion IP-addressable public internet devices which were scanned for 30 ports. It concludes that over 160 million devices have open ports which shouldn’t be exposed to the internet.
2.3 million internet-connected devices have been identified with an open SMB port, according to a blog post by John Matherly, the founder of the search engine Shodan.
Moreover, around 970,000 of these devices have “guest access” enabled, thus, allowing open access to the data shared via SMB file-sharing protocol. Other than being vulnerable to WannaCry, these devices might be compromised even by simple malware.
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