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May 15, 2017

On the WannaCry ransomware attack: could it have been avoided?

On May 12, 2017, hundreds of thousands of computers worldwide were targeted by the infamous WannaCry attack. Would it have been possible to avoid it by means other than installing a patch to the affected Windows operating systems? Can similar situations be prevented rather than cured? Security researchers from the IMDEA Software Institute explore in this document what cutting-edge computer science can do now and what could be done in the future.