No, Windows XP didn't fuel Wanna cry by technology

the global WannaCry assault that started out 10 days ago touched just a handful of windows XP pcs, a security professional stated Monday, contradicting the narrative that the elderly OS become largely responsible for the ransomware's crippling effect.

"There were no actual WannaCry infections of windows XP," said Costin Raiu, director of Kaspersky Lab's global studies and analysis team, in an interview Monday. "we've got seen handiest a handful of instances, less than a dozen, and it looks like most of them have been testers [self-infecting systems]."

Raiu's declare countered an declaration made by way of truely every media file and weblog post published after "WannaCry" emerged June 12. countless information memories blamed windows XP, which Microsoft retired three years ago, for falling sufferer to the assault because the vulnerability that WannaCry exploited had no longer been patched within the out of date OS.

as opposed to take goal at windows XP, WannaCry targeted windows 7 and windows Server 2008, Kaspersky's information confirmed. The widespread majority -- 98.4% -- had placed the crosshairs on home windows 7, which remains the sector's maximum famous version. To provide you with that determine, Kaspersky tallied the WannaCry detections its security software logged -- and blocked -- on numerous versions of Microsoft's operating machine.

The reason for XP's absence from the WannaCry count number changed into easy. "WannaCry itself did now not aid windows XP," Raui stated, noting that the make the most neither targeted on XP or reliably labored on the 2001 working gadget. character machines can be infected -- the researchers and testers who positioned WannaCry on windows XP systems possibly ran it manually -- but the malicious program-like attack code could no longer unfold from an XP laptop, and in a few cases, executing the take advantage of crashed the computer.

That put Microsoft's selection to difficulty a safety patch for windows XP in a one-of-a-kind mild.

overdue on may 12, Microsoft took the remarkable step of issuing patches for long-demoted versions of windows, inclusive of windows XP, to immunize computers towards WannaCry. "Given the capability impact to customers and their corporations, we made the decision to make the safety update for structures [currently] in custom help," a Microsoft manager said at the time. custom guide is a post-retirement pay-for-patches software available simplest to corporate customers.