Summary of the State of the Worm
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/05/13/wannacrypt_ransomware_worm/
Contains this tidbit:-
We're told 16 NHS health trusts in the UK were taken out by the malware. Prime Minister Theresa May said the code "has crippled" Brit hospitals, and that Blighty's surveillance nerve center GCHQ is looking into the outbreak. The NHS is thought to have been particularly hard hit because of the antiquated nature of its IT infrastructure. A large part of the organization's systems are still using Windows XP, which is no longer supported by Microsoft, and Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt cancelled a pricey support package in 2015 as a cost-saving measure.
Cancelled in May 2015. £5.5m
https://twitter.com/withorpe/status/863088159961210880
* facepalm *
Please make Jeremy Hunt (and the Tories) pay for this particular piece of madness in the next election.
If people had auto-updated their windows, and if they'd updated OS version, and if they'd paid for extendd support of obsolete versions we wouldn't be in this mess. But it gets worse. If the NSA hadn't hoarded the exploit and then had it stolen. And on and on.
Current estimate is that the unnecessary deaths started around 2pm on Friday. And this is now a global thing, not just the NHS. So while on the surface it's comically farcical, it's also (literally) deadly serious.
This overhead would have paid for the conversion, throughout the NHS. The rest is gravy.
So yes, Linux might help. And yes, https://www.nhsbuntu.org/ is a worthy effort, but,
And then there's today's Microsoft blog and commentary on it.
"WannaCry is worldwide civilian collateral damage from American cyberwar"