Healthcare and Manufacturing Industries Still Threatened by WannaCry

Although many thought that WannaCry was in the rear view mirror, a recent report by Artemis, based on client experience, found that health care organizations and manufacturing companies are still being hit with the ransomware that affected hundreds of thousands of machines in 2017.

According to the report, 40 percent of Artemis’ healthcare clients and 60 percent of its manufacturing clients were hit with at least one WannaCry-related attack in the last six months. The reason for these dismal statistics is that these two industries use legacy systems that aren’t able to be patched, or haven’t been patched for the virus. As a result, the virus is still affecting a large number of machines in these industries.

It is such a widespread problem that Microsoft took the unusual step of releasing limited patches for some legacy systems, and issued a warning to these industries (and others still using legacy systems) to patch quickly or face an attack on a known vulnerability.

According to Artemis, there are 3,500 successful WannaCry attacks per hour worldwide, with more than 145,000 devices in 103 countries potentially compromised.