Nations Seek the Elusive Cure for Cyberattacks

WASHINGTON — When the “Wannacry” ransomware attack spread across Britain, Japan Russia, Taiwan and places in between last May, it took only a few days for private firms that looked at the code to come to some pretty quick conclusions. The attack almost certainly came from North Korea. The North Koreans almost certainly used computer code that had leaked from the inner sanctum of the National Security Agency. And the ransomware part was a scam: If you paid off the hackers, your data still wasn’t restored.