WannaCry ransomware: mayhem, money, scenarios, hypotheses, and implications

I think my ESET colleague Michael Aguilar had the best opening for an article on Friday's epic WannaCry ransomware outbreak:

"That escalated quickly! For those of you who did not read any news on Friday (or had your heads in the sand), you need to know that a massive tidal wave of malware just struck Planet Earth, creating gigantic waves in the information security sphere and even bigger waves for the victims." (We Live Security).

The English language version of the message WannaCry presents to victims 

And in the days since Friday you may have been caught up in the waves of breathless WannaCry reporting, tracking, analysis, advice (hashtag #wannacry). All of which was soon followed by the first rounds of finger-pointing and victim-blaming. I am hoping to write more about the latter shortly, but for now I want to speculate about "what the heck happened" as they say in Fargo-land.

Never speculate?

As a rule, cybersecurity professionals refuse to speculate in public about what the heck is going on in any given data breach of malicious code scenario. And by speculate I mean suggest explanations for the events at hand that go beyond the facts on hand. You especially don't want to point fingers at perpetrators unless you have an abundance of corroborating evidence (including some that is not digital, meaning "more than just code analysis").

All that said, it is helpful, and entirely justified IMPO, to consider, in the abstract, possible explanations for an exceptional course of events such as we have just witnessed with WannaCry.

1. It was just a money-making play: WannaCry presented itself as ransomware, the goal of which is to make money by charging people for the key to their data, which you have just encrypted without their permission. You can make a lot of money with ransomware, but it works best if you roll out your campaign in a controlled fashion, one that allows you to keep up with payments and key requests and customer service calls (yes, that is a thing; for example, many victims need help figuring out Bitcoin, the preferred method of ransom payment).

2. It was a narcissistic idiot play: Somebody figured they could create better ransomware than anyone else but didn't anticipate all of the implications of adding the NSA's eternalblue SMB exploit to a standard phishing based ransomware program (and yes, that link takes any person with an internet connection to the eternalblue code repository - which IMPO is crazy, but that's another article).

3. It was an intentional mayhem play: WannaCry spread faster than any sane cybercriminal would intentionally spread a ransomware campaign. So maybe the idea was to cause mayhem. When ESET holds its annual Cyber Boot Camp my colleague Cameron will award "mayhem points" to students who come up with a particularly imaginative way of causing chaos on the test network, but we conduct that camp under tightly controlled conditions in a secured facility. Nation states or their surrogates may feel inclined to conduct mayhem in the real world, as a distraction, to send a message, or even to undermine consumer confidence in technologies to which some countries do not yet have access, and so on.

4. It was a revenge play: What better way to show you are pissed off at the US government in general and the NSA in particular than to wreak global cyber-havoc with malware that is openly enabled by code developed by the NSA, leaked code that the NSA refuse to barter for.

So what are the implications?

Each of these four scenarios seems plausible to me, but of course I'm going to refuse to speculate as to whether one is more plausible than another. What I will assert is that pondering the scenarios may help investigators consider the full range of possibilities as they seek to identify the perpetrators.

For more background on WannaCry and what you should be doing to protect your IT systems against it, see Michael's original We Live Security article. There is also a follow up article on We Live Security and more to come, so be sure to sign up for the email alerts.

If you are interested in thinking more about what it means for government agencies to handle malware, consider this article and attached peer reviewed paper, presented at the NATO conference on cyber conflict.