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Comment by mr_overalls | Hacker News Reader

You've got to admit it's a little funny when an OS's security flaws prevent even targeted malware from working properly.

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Heh. Since this only works before a reboot and Windows 10, by design, destructively reboots with no recourse, I could imagine this ironic farce:

a) security holes lead to a ransom, b) security holes let you reverse the ransom, but c) forced reboots kill any hope you have of recovering with this kind of hack.

But Windows 10 was for the same reason largely not affected: it was patched and rebooted.

And Windows XP was not targeted at all by WannaCry.

In that case, Microsoft wouldn't have released an emergency patch for XP, three years after end of support. But they did [0].

[0]: https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/msrc/2017/05/12/customer...

XP could be targeted theoretically, the bug is there. But the particular WannaCry variant (which Kevin Beaumont‏ looked at) didn't work under XP:

https://twitter.com/GossiTheDog/status/863339558364229634

https://twitter.com/GossiTheDog/status/863100619242053632

Come back to me when you find a single infection on XP with wcry 2.0, and then go look at when your 'emergency' patch was signed (Feb 17). Have you ever heard of 'PR'?

Windows XP systems were the primary victims of WannaCry.

That is untrue: https://twitter.com/craiu/status/865562842149392384

This assumes that Kaspersky software usage is consistent across Windows versions, which seems vanishingly unlikely since most XP systems are in China or in Corp environments.

I may have been thinking of 7.

> Windows 10, by design, destructively reboots with no recourse

Eh? Under what circumstance?

It sort-of-hibernates if fast startup is enabled: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/jj...

That looks on-demand to me, I'm struggling to see the relevance?

It's by default which I learned when Linux complained it couldn't mount the Windows partition at startup.

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