Honda plant in Japan briefly stops making cars after fresh WannaCrypt outbreak Honda said today that it had briefly halted operations at a car plant in Sayama, Japan earlier this week because of the infamous WannaCrypt ransomware. The Japanese car maker halted production for one day at a domestic vehicle plant on Monday after finding samples of the WannaCrypt ransomware in its computer network, Reuters …
It is the price you pay for using a generic OS without stripping it down and securing it for industrial control. There will be more of that (lots more) and it will only get worse until it gets better as the I Do Internet Of Things people will continue to ship basic unsecured builds for the foreseeable future.
Whereas if they build their own OS from scratch and something leaked, you'd presumably saying that they should be using 'tried and tested' solutions. Especially when it comes to encryption - rolling your own is never a good thing then.
And... the article doesn't say that it was in industrial control gear, just in 'their network'.
> I suspect it is more down to shitty vendor's software that breaks easily with MS patches
Reminds me of the time about a year back when this obscure little product named Outlook 2013 was broken* by a Windows 7 patch Tuesday "fix" that took them 2 or 3 goes to get right.
* As in, crash on every launch and not fixed by a reinstall of Outlook.
So ... using modest imagination and not detective work as there's insufficient information and at a distance of thousands of miles ... they might have been running something Really Secure (TM) as their OS, but put a Virtual instance of something Not Secure (no trademark necessary) to run a vital piece of legacy software. It would explain an original WannaCry, and the quick recovery. Only 24 hours, so no Karōshi (過労死).
It's been alluded to before, but perhaps the automotive IT people did prevent WannaCry by turning off some OS service. Perhaps they even compiled a batch / registry file to ensure that all unwanted OS services were still turned off after an OS update. Perhaps said update happened unexpectedly. Perhaps nobody was there to disconnect networking while the update was in process. Perhaps Coupling.
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