I've been reading for 20+ years about these things called Macs that are far safer than Windows, and yet, somehow, nobody actually uses them.
"Nobody"? Even in the enterprise?
The rest of your comment misses my point: Perhaps in theory, OS X is "just an vulnerable," and maybe the OS X market share means malware authors don't bother. But whatever the causes, in the real world today, the results are undeniable: less malware on Macs.
The mechanisms of Cryptowall work under any OS.
Except, as the AC said, it doesn't presently work under OS X. I've been reading for 20+ years how "Macs are just as vulnerable as Windows," and yet, somehow, that malware parity never seems to happen. Sure, every now and then there's a headline about Mac malware, but when you read the article it's either a theoretical vulnerability or, at worst, something that happened to a handful of people. You can claim it's because malware authors don't want to bother with Macs or whatever, but the end result is the same: Windows users are always dealing with more malware than Mac users, and, I'll bet, always will. So the modded-down-to-oblivion poster above is not wrong: getting a Mac would have prevented this attack, and many others.
I've watched way too many zombie movies to feel comfortable with the drug's name.
Heck, never mind the name, this is the beginning of the plot of more zombie movies than I can count.
> It is not known how the US government has determined that North Korea is the culprit
Of course it's known. The same way they established that Iraq had chemical weapons. The method is known as "because we say so".
Are you joking? I thought it was well established that there were chemical weapons in Iraq we just only found weapons designed by us, built by Europeans in factories in Iraq. And therefore the US didn't trumpet their achievements. In the case of Iraqi chemical weapons, the US established that Iraq had chemical weapons not because they said so but because Western countries had all the receipts.
Top Ten Things Overheard At The ANSI C Draft Committee Meetings: (5) All right, who's the wiseguy who stuck this trigraph stuff in here?