Security News Cracked Windows installations are serially infected with EternalBlue exploit code

LASER_oneXM

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According to a new blog post published by Avira, unpatched systems remain exposed to cyber attacks and are serially infected by threat actors.

“There are still significant numbers of repeatedly infected machines more than a year after the big WannaCry and Petya attacks,” said Mikel Echevarria-Lizarraga, senior virus analyst in the Avira Protection Lab.

“Our research has linked this to Windows machines that haven’t been updated against the NSA Eternal Blue exploit and are an open target for malware.”

The number of unpatched systems exposed online is very high, experts pointed out that most of them have been infected multiple times, they were found to run cracked Windows installations this means that they did not receive Microsoft’s security updates.

Avira decided to turn off the SMB1 protocol entirely on the infected machine to stop the endless infection loop.
The experts discovered around 300,000 computers affected by the issue and the Avira Protection whatever is deactivating the SMB1 protocol on around 14,000 computers daily.
The list of the top ten countries for serially infected machines is:
  • Indonesia
  • Taiwan
  • Vietnam
  • Thailand
  • Egypt
  • Russia
  • China
  • Philippines
  • India
  • Turkey
The above list doesn’t surprise the experts, according to studies from Statista, the above countries are top nations for the use of unlicensed software.
“The predominance of infected machines outside of North America and Europe roughly parallels studies from Statista on the use of unlicensed software.” concluded AVIRA.

“This study found unlicensed software rates averaging around 52 – 60% outside the United States and the European Union and fell to 16% and 28% respectively in these areas. Unlicensed software is usually unable to get the latest patches against vulnerabilities such as EternalBlue.”
 
L

Local Host

Talk about click-n-bait title, has nothing to do with the content. Unpatched Windows Systems are exposed, not Cracked Windows Systems.

Unlicensed software is usually unable to get the latest patches against vulnerabilities such as EternalBlue.

This is false, guess this is all a scare campaign to get people to buy Windows, not that I care, I bought my license ages ago.
 
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shmu26

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The smarter software pirates activate their Windows installations and their MS Office suites with KMS activators, and then they can get all the latest updates, because Microsoft relates to it as legally activated.
But there are some older, cracked versions of Windows 7 and earlier that do not get the updates. That's what they are talking about.
 
F

ForgottenSeer 58943

The smarter software pirates activate their Windows installations and their MS Office suites with KMS activators

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