Comment by titzer
1 day ago
Ransomware attacks against hospitals and a dark extortion economy churning tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars a year in losses and waste.
What would the "sky falling" look like to you? If you're expecting dramatic movie scenes like something out of Mr Robot, I'm afraid the reality is more mundane, just a never-ending series of basic programming errors that turn into remote code execution exploits because of language and compiler choices by people who don't pay the costs.
To completely eliminate the possibility of ransomware attack, you need an incredibly locked down platform, and users who are impervious to social engineering.
Vulnerabilities to ransomware (and other forms of malware) can be perpetrated without a single bad pointer being dereferenced.
For instance, a memory-safe e-mail program can automatically open an attachment, and the memory-safe application which handles the attachment can blindly run code embedded in the document in a leaky sandbox.
There is an incredible amount of infrastructure out there that depends on C. Embedded devices, mobile devices, desktops, servers. Network stacks, telephony stacks, storage, you name it. Encryption, codecs, ...
Sky is falling would mean all of it would be falling down so badly that, for instance, you would have about a 50% chance of connecting a server that is more than four hops away.