Re: It us just you
That is an odd thing to say.
1) WPP has an 'offshore' registered office, as if registering yourself in the Isle of Man, Jersey or Sark makes you any less British?
2) WPP is certainly up there with being one of the largest employers in the UK. Obviously not all of the +205k staff are British but a good number are.
Speaking as a WPP staff member we were told about the incident several hours after the original incident occurred. Note that there is no such thing as "WPP VPN Network" which spans every company, Most companies operate their own closed private networks and allow other Joint Ventures with WPP member companies access to that VPN, thus a Ogilvy & Mather and JWT project for British Chocolate Company might be a specific BCCOMJWT company with its own office, seconded staff and IT unit, plus access to both OM and JWT VPNs. This is possibly what occurred in Ukraine, but I do not know..
All staff were instructed to shut down computers and effectively go home. As the nominated unlucky last out of the door, I got to go through an entire floor of a big office near Strand and double check that every Lenovo or Dell laptop had actually been powered off and every iMac had its power cable pulled out, just in case. Next day all Mac users were told that it was safe for them to work but all Windows users could either have access to a spare Mac, if possible, or wait and see. By the end of the week I think that everyone groupwide was back up and running.
I do not think that anyone at WPP or a WPP company, apart from a couple of staff in a Ukrainian office, actually had a computer affected by the attack (well, apart from losing several days work). I do however think it was a bit of a relief that a certain company's staff put their hands up almost immediately and confessed that their 'patching' had not taken place.
On reflection: lack of administration access granting is a major issue - both on Macs and on Windows which I gather is now being dealt with. Better install profiling for both Mac and Windows is certainly called for.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
