Over the past week, countless organizations around the world were victims of a cyberattack involving WannaCry ransomware. While the EU’s law enforcement agency called the attack “unprecedented,” it was perhaps only unique in scale. In fact, this attack was neither sophisticated nor innovative. It had many precedents and was definitely preventable.

For starters, according to numerous security analysts, WannaCry took advantage of a file-sharing vulnerability in Windows that was repurposed using commonly available “Ransomware-as-a-Service” to package the attack and allow it to support multiple languages simultaneously. To make matters worse, Microsoft had actually released a patch for these vulnerabilities in all supported versions of the OS back in March. But not everyone installed those patches, and this complacency led to disaster.

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