Making Sense of the Ransomware Mess (and Planning a Sensible Path Forward)

It started out as a seemingly isolated event. Reports early during the morning of 12 May 2017 talked about an unknown piece of ransomware attacking systems within the British National Health System (NHS) hospital network. Well over 50,000 NHS systems were infected, forcing affected hospitals to divert pat ients to other facilities. As hours passed, however, it became clear that this event was not isolated, and systems spanning more than 150 countries quickly succumbed to what would come to be known as WannaCry (which is known by multiple names including WanaCry, WannaCrypt, and WannaCrypt0r, among others.)