People monitor the spread of ransomware cyber-attacks at the Korea Internet and Security Agency in Seoul in May 2017.
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s administration is publicly blaming North Korea for a ransomware attack that infected hundreds of thousands of computers worldwide in May and crippled parts of Britain’s National Health Service.
Homeland security adviser Tom Bossert wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed published Monday night that North Korea was “directly responsible” for the WannaCry ransomware attack and that Pyongyang will be held accountable for it.
Bossert said the administration’s finding of responsibility is based on evidence and confirmed by other governments and private companies, including the United Kingdom and Microsoft.
Stella's Place 
A friend works in the IT department of a major university. He planned the network, ordered the components, oversaw the installation, and now monitors it for security problems.
Every fall there’s a flood of new viruses, trojans, worms, et cetera as new students arrive and plug their infested systems into the university network, which is behind a firewall.
That university is under constant cyberattack from North Korea, so I asked him why they don’t just reject all connection connection requests from North Korean IP addresses.
His response astounded me.
“We can’t do that. We’re an international research university.”
I’m pretty sure he said that there are North Koreans authorized to access the university’s resources.
That was a while back, and so now I wonder if it’s still like that, or if the President has shut that off now.
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