Tarah Wheeler and John, Lord Alderdice, “Cyber Collateral: WannaCry & the impact of cyberattacks on the mental health of critical infrastructure defenders”
On May 12th, 2017, North Korea unleashed a cyberattack of devastating size and impact on the United States. WannaCry was a ransomware attack that cost up to USD 4 billion, crippled law firms, rerouted ambulances, shut down one of the largest mobile communications operators in Europe, and (spilling outside the bounds of any intended cyber war zone) damaged the UK National Health Service with effects still felt today. Patients were turned away from hospitals, 13,500 outpatient appointments were cancelled including 139 screenings for cancer, and the information security professionals who responded that day remember it like the afternoon in 1963 that US President John F. Kennedy was shot or the morning of 9/11 when the Twin Towers came down. Overloaded technicians at British hospitals spent a week trying to keep emergency rooms open, doctors safe, and networks online. These frontline defenders kept the hospitals running, often by yanking laptops out of the hands of staff and replacing them with updated hardware as they ran through hospitals seeing a deadly red screen in office after office, patient room after patient room. Until a young British security researcher in rural Devonshire found a means to stop the attack, WannaCry infected computers faster than people could blink…..
