No one could prevent another ‘WannaCry-style’ attack, says DHS official

Zack Whittaker @zackwhittaker / 12:26 pm EDT • October 6, 2019

The U.S. government may not be able to prevent another global cyberattack like WannaCry, a senior cybersecurity official has said.

Jeanette Manfra, the assistant director for cybersecurity for Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), said on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt SF that the 2017 WannaCry cyberattack, which saw hundreds of thousands of computers around the world infected with ransomware, was uniquely challenging because it spread so quickly.

“I don’t know that we could ever prevent something like that,” said Manfra, referring to another WannaCry-style attack. “We just have something that completely manifests itself as a worm. I think the original perpetrators didn’t expect probably that sort of impact,” she added.

The WannaCry cyberattack was the first major global security incident in years. Hackers believed to be associated with North Korea used a set of highly classified hacking tools that only weeks earlier had been stolen from the National Security Agency and published online. The tools allowed anyone who used them to infect thousands of vulnerable computers with a backdoor. That backdoor was used to deliver the WannaCry payload, which locked out users from their own files unless they paid a ransom.

Making matters worse, WannaCry had wormable properties, allowing it to spread across a network and making it difficult to contain.

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