Microsoft accused, yesterday, the US National Security Agency (NSA), in the hands of Donald Trump´s government, of having let the flight and further expansion of the "WannaCry" virus which continues crawling halfway across the world and which has already infected the computers of 179 countries, 1,200 of them in Spain. The head of the legal department of the technological company, producer of the Windows OS through which the infection has spread, Brad Smith, explained that hackers had stolen the malware to the NSA by the beginning of this year. And confirmed that the first attacks had been registered in Spain and the UK. Moreover, Russia and China accused the USA of having something to do in the expansion of the haemorrhage.
To add fuel to the fire and warn of the vulnerability of the system, Microsoft spokesperson granted that this is the equivalent of stealing a Tomahawk missile to the US army. It was also reminded that the CIA had also used a software in some iPhone mobile phones and in Samsung televisions to spy on their users and turn them into "undercover microphones", as Wikileaks revealed. "This type of programme which is in the hands of Governments has been repeatedly filtered to the public domain and suffering from widespread damage", assured Smith in an article published in the company´s corporate blog. And he adds: "this attack should be taken as a warning call. We need to adopt a different approach and have the cyberspace abiding by the same regulations as the arms market in the physical world". According to some Chinese experts the virus "WannaCry" is based on the app called "EternalBlue", which was developed by the US National Security Agency "to attack computers".
In a very similar direction aimed the Russian president, Vladimir Putin. "I think that Microsoft directive board has already pointed to the US secret services as the main source of the virus. Russia has nothing to do with this", assured. Although the majority of cyberattacks took place in Russia, Putin claimed that the national public institutions "have not suffered from severe damages, nor the banks or health system, although, in general, there is nothing positive in this and it is worrisome".
Although Spain was the origin of the cyberhackers, the country only counted 1,200 computers infected, as reported yesterday by the National Cybersecurity Institute (Incibe). This agency claims that "in a worldwide scale more than 230,000 computer systems have been detected as affected by the different versions of the virus in a total of 179 countries, Spain is number 16 in the ranking of the most hit ones". In Asturias, however, the regional government as well as the Asturias businessmen Federation (FADE) pointed that there is no news of any incident.
The regional business organisation disclosed yesterday a tutorial among its members, developed by its IT technicians, about how to act when you are victim to one of these attacks. "In case of detecting an infection it is very important to turn off the system which has been attacked to clean it" recommends FADE. And it adds: "Under no circumstances it is recommended to pay for the rescue of the information as we would be funding a criminal organisation which would increasingly spread".
The Chinese government has warned that the virus mutated in the last few hours, and some experts point that the programmed launched by the cybercriminals is able to skip the first containment measures put into effect. The head of the Chinese Cyberspace Strategies Institute, Qin An, showed that the "virtual weapons developed by the USA remind the world of the great damage which the US network haemorrhage can cause". As some calculations, the "WannaCry" would have infected computer systems in 30,000 companies or public institutions, especially schools, in this Asian country. The head of the Spanish government, Mariano Rajoy, who was visiting China indeed, refused to make unfounded speculations about the origin of the cyberattack and dismissed any commentary on the event.
