This might sound odd, but every time WannaCry comes up, I feel more relief than pride.
At the time it was chaos everywhere. News, alerts, group chats lighting up. For us though? The office was shut for the weekend. Machines were off. That’s honestly the whole story.
When we powered things back on, the kill switch had already been found, and it was basically over. Everyone breathed out and moved on. But lately I’ve been thinking how close that was to being a very different Monday.
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Yeah, that exhale feeling is familiar.
I remember walking in expecting disaster and… nothing. No encrypted screens. No phones ringing. Just quiet. It felt like walking into a room after a storm and realizing your house is still standing.
People congratulated IT. I smiled, but inside I knew we hadn’t done anything yet. We just arrived after the fire burned itself out.
Same here, and I didn’t even feel relieved right away. It hit me later.
At the time it was “cool, we’re safe.” Weeks later it turned into “wait, why were we safe?” The answer wasn’t patches or prep. It was timing. That’s a weird thing to be grateful for.
Ever since then, I get uneasy when someone says “we handled that well” without looking at the calendar.
I was newer back then and thought that’s just how incidents go. You brace, you check, you move on.
Only later did I realize how thin that line was. Same systems, same holes. If that kill switch hadn’t been found when it was, we’d be telling a very different story.
I guess the relief comes with a side of humility. WannaCry didn’t spare us because we were ready. It spared us because we got lucky.
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