Telkom has urged customers to patch and secure their Windows systems in the wake of the WannaCry ransomware which infected PCs around the world.<\/p>\n
WannaCry caused a surge in traffic on the Telkom network, which the company said resulted in the degradation of performance of its service platforms.<\/p>\n
Mobile subscribers complained on 16 May<\/strong><\/a> that they could not access Telkom\u2019s USSD menu and that the mobile app was not working.<\/p>\n The outage made it impossible for Telkom subscribers to buy data bundles or manage their accounts.<\/p>\n It was also not possible to get through to Telkom\u2019s call centre, and its website went down intermittently.<\/p>\n A security researcher stopped WannaCry in its tracks by inadvertently activating its kill switch, but Telkom warned that devices still remain vulnerable to the underlying attack.<\/p>\n Called EternalBlue, the attack was leaked online by hacking group The Shadow Brokers, who breached the NSA and stole a cache of cyber weapons belonging to the US government.<\/p>\n The NSA alerted Microsoft to the breach<\/strong><\/a> and the nature of the vulnerability it had discovered in Windows. By March, Microsoft had issued a patch.<\/p>\n However, many machines remain unpatched. A failure which the WannaCry creators exploited.<\/p>\n \u201cDevices and systems remain vulnerable until they are patched,\u201d said Telkom.<\/p>\n \u201cUnpatched devices such as laptops, PCs, and tablets may continue to generate excessive network traffic and could be vulnerable to a potential second wave of the virus, should it appear in a different variant.\u201d<\/p>\n Security researchers have warned of a recently-discovered attack which also uses exploits leaked by The Shadow Brokers.<\/p>\n Called EternalRocks<\/strong><\/a>, the attack uses seven of the leaked exploits – WannaCry only used two.<\/p>\n Windows users can check if their operating system is up to date by going to Settings > Update and Security > Windows Update.<\/p>\n Telkom has urged customers to patch and secure their Windows systems in the wake of the WannaCry ransomware.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":130892,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sma_x_autopost_status":"idle","_sma_x_autopost_error":"","_sma_x_post_id":"","_sma_facebook_post_id":"","_sma_instagram_post_id":"","_sma_threads_post_id":"","_sma_x_attempts":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[35,123,23215,38539,109,43154,807],"class_list":["post-211956","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-security","tag-headline","tag-microsoft","tag-national-security-agency-nsa","tag-shadow-brokers","tag-telkom","tag-wannacry","tag-windows"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211956"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=211956"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211956\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":212152,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211956\/revisions\/212152"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/130892"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=211956"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=211956"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=211956"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}WannaCry is inert, but watch out<\/h3>\n
Now read: Almost all WannaCry victims were using Windows 7<\/a><\/h3>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"