back to article 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 …

  1. Voland's right hand Silver badge

    The price you pay for using generic OS for industrial control

    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.

    1. Anonymous Coward Silver badge
      Paris Hilton

      Re: The price you pay for using generic OS for industrial control

      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'.

      1. Paul Crawford Silver badge

        Re: The price you pay for using generic OS for industrial control

        I suspect it is more down to shitty vendor's software that breaks easily with MS patches, and/or the risk assessment that such problems were more likely than an infection.

        Maybe in said assesment they were wrong, of course.

        1. Adam 1

          Re: The price you pay for using generic OS for industrial control

          > 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.

      2. yet_another_wumpus

        Re: The price you pay for using generic OS for industrial control

        The other half is that they had real backups (presumably. Or it certainly would have taken more than 24 hours). Even then, 24 hours of downtime is bad enough that they would want to run something other than windows.

      3. Hans 1
        Coffee/keyboard

        Re: The price you pay for using generic OS for industrial control

        they should be using 'tried and tested' solutions.

        Well, that means Windows is out of question, then, right ?

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Joke

    WannaCar ?

    See title...

  3. Blotto Silver badge

    The virus was not proxy aware so the registered domain didn't work for those who went through a proxy

    1. GrapeBunch

      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.

  4. nilfs2
    Thumb Up

    Good, that means less ricers and distracted soccer moms

    I'm up for anything that would take ricers and distracted soccer moms off the streets.

    1. 's water music

      Re: Good, that means less ricers and distracted soccer moms

      Dammit, I felt had to downvote this post for dimwit racism and misogyny. Now I need to create a sock puppet so I can also downvote the use of less for fewer

  5. Kaltern

    Possibly planted by McLaren F1 Team for 'services rendered'...

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Encrypt

    makes the plant no Honda.

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