When you put a device online without protection, within minutes it will become a target of attacks as seen by Jake Lahtinen

This is a little bit of a nerdy post for people into cyber security and honeypots, but stick with this and we will explain what a honeypot is. Jake Lahtinen also known as @iamj3k on Twitter posted a photo with a description that was retweeted by Mikko Hypponen the CRO at F-Secure.

after about 15 minutes of setting up my honeypot, I've got ~2000+ DoublePulsar exploit attempts and 3 unique samples of WannaCry virus.

This is why you don't want to plugin your PC to the interwebz without protection. pic.twitter.com/6Xn53KZfiP

— Jake Lahtinen (@iamj3k) May 26, 2018

Honeypots are amazing things, they are (insecure in this case) virtual systems that looks like regular devices so attackers and automated systems attempt to break into them, the idea is to discover attacks hopefully before they get into the rest of a network or infect real systems. They are used for research to see what the current state of automated attacks are on the web, and placed on a companies networks in some cases to act like motion sensors for attacks. The big part about Jake’s post is that he had “3 unique samples of WannaCry virus” within 15 minutes. This just shows how much viruses like WannaCry is still installed and out in the wild.

This is a big reminder why you should never put devices online that are not protected in some way, and always keep devices updated to prevent it being broken into or even worst used for a botnet (A network of breached devices attackers use to attack others).