WannaCry Re-emerges at Boeing

WannaCry is still around and aerospace giant Boeing is the latest victim. In a flurry of activity on Wednesday, Boeing found itself infected, analyzed the infection, contained and cleaned the affected systems, and returned to normal operations.

According to an internal notice sent from Mike VanderWel, chief engineer at Boeing Commercial Airplane production engineering, an infection at the company's North Charleston facility warranted an "all hands on deck" response to the problem. While there were initial concerns that the malware might have reached production process control computers, forensics showed that not to be the case.

In the final analysis, the company said that the infection was limited to a small number of systems and that production and delivery of airplanes and components was not affected. A Boeing representative issued a statement saying that the attack was limited to computers in the commercial airplanes division and that the military and services units were not affected.

In a statement to the press, Mounir Hahad, head of Juniper Threat Labs at Juniper Networks noted that WannaCry's infection mechanism can easily lie dormant and undetected on computers that have not been protected and patched. "Many systems may have been infected by WannaCry last year, but did not display any symptoms due to the presence of the 'kill switch' domain. But, as soon as an infected computer is rebooted in an environment where it does not have access to the Internet, it will resume the infection process."

In Boeing's case, their representative states that the WannaCry infection incident has ended with no significant damage to the company.

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