Windows 7 Spreads WannaCry Ransomware

Unfortunately, whenever a new product has success on the market, companies usually tend to put maintenance projects for their old ones in the background. This is probably what happened at Microsoft this week, with older versions of Windows being widely affected by a new and nasty ransomware named WannaCry, or WannaCrypt. Windows 10 devices were not affected at all, which goes to show that newer products are always kept safer.

While at the beginning, many people thought that Windows XP was the main culprit in spending the ransomware, recent reports might indicate otherwise. Windows XP was initially blamed mainly because it’s quite old, and has a lot of security flaws that are not being fixed anymore because user rates for it are dropping at a rapid rate.

But recent reports from Kaspersky Labs actually show that 64-bit versions of Windows 7 are those that were the most widely affected by the WannaCry ransomware. In fact, Windows XP infections actually represented a mere 0.1% of the total, which makes their number very negligible. Windows 10 held 0.03% of the total number of infections, which shows that there were a few computers affected, but not enough to be considered a relevant sample.

However, Windows 7 held over 98% of the total number of infections, which is unfortunate seeing as it’s still the most popular operating system that Microsoft has released so far. In fact, Windows 7 holds almost half of the market share in this respective area, while Windows XP ranks at a mere 7%. Thus, it becomes less surprising that most infections affected device running Windows 7, but one would hope that Microsoft paid more attention to it given its immense popularity on the user market.

How about you? Are you a Windows 7 user? If so, what do you think? Let us know.