According to a revealing report by “The Register,” the patch to combat WannaCry, which was released by Microsoft last week for Windows XP, had already been created since February. However, the company chose to make it public only after the start of the global ransomware cyberattack that paralyzed electronic systems all over the world.
We remind you that last March, Microsoft released a patch to address the security gap on all of its supported operating systems, while a few days ago it announced the release of a corresponding patch for unsupported systems (including Windows XP, Windows Server 2003 and Windows 8) after many of its customers worldwide were hit by WannaCrypt in one of the largest ransomware in global Internet history.
According to The Register, the company had already been aware of the vulnerability since January, having internal information about the NSA intercepting the exploits and expecting a possible leak online.
Furthermore, as revealed by an analysis of metadata related to the security updates released last week, the patches for unsupported systems were created and digitally signed on February 11, 13, and 17, the same week that the patches for supported versions of Windows were created.
This indicates that the company had the corresponding security updates ready since mid-February, although it only announced their release last Friday, when the attack had already reached significant proportions.
So far, Microsoft has not officially commented on the issue, but the extent of the attack could have been drastically limited if the update had been released earlier.
