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'The whole network is down': Fresh cyber attack wreaks havoc across the world
Yahoo7 and Agencies
A new and highly virulent outbreak of malicious data-scrambling software is causing mass disruption across the world, hitting companies and governments in Europe especially hard.
Officials in Ukraine reported serious intrusions of the country’s power grid as well as at banks and government offices, where one senior executive posted a photo of a darkened computer screen and the words, “the whole network is down.”
Several multinational companies said they were targeted, including US pharmaceutical giant Merck, Russian state oil giant Rosneft, British advertising giant WPP and the French industrial group Saint-Gobain.
Two Australian firms are thought to have been affected – global lawyer firm DLA Piper’s local office while the Cadbury chocolate factory in Hobart received a ransom notice demanding $300 worth of the virtual currency Bitcoin, the ABC reports.
The companies affected were hit by a type of ransomware that locks users out of the computer and demands purchase of a key to reinstate access.
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‘All the trademarks of WannaCry’
The cyber attack has all the trademarks of ‘Wanna Cry’ a cyber attack that wreaked havoc globally last month, demanding bitcoins.
IT experts identified the virus as “Petrwrap”, a modified version of the Petya ransomware which hit last year and demanded money from victims in exchange for the return of their data.
But global cybersecurity firm Kaspersky Lab said: “Our preliminary findings suggest that it is not a variant of Petya ransomware as publically reported, but a new ransomware that has not been seen before,” which it named “NotPetya”.
The cyberattack also recalled a ransomware outbreak last month which hit more than 150 countries and a total of more than 200,000 victims with the WannaCry ransomware.
The virus is “spreading around the world, a large number of countries are affected,” Costin Raiu, a researcher at the Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab said in a Twitter post.
In the United States, Merck was hit as was New York law firm of DLA Piper.
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“We confirm our company’s computer network was compromised today as part of a global hack. Other organisations have also been affected,” Merck said on Twitter.
‘Professional attack’
“It seems to be done by professionals criminals, and I think money is the motivation,” said Sean Sullivan, a researcher at the Finnish cybersecurity group F-Secure.
He said that unlike the recent WannaCry attack, this “Petrwrap” attack has sophisticated elements that could make it easier to rapidly infect many more systems.
Ukrainian Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman wrote on Facebook that the attacks in his country were “unprecedented” but insisted that “important systems were not affected.”
On a day of panic and chaos, it was the Ukranian government’s public response that raised a few eyebrows, using a popular meme to sum up the situation.
Importantly, the radiation monitoring system at Ukraine’s Chernobyl nuclear site was taken offline after it was targeted in the attack, forcing employees to use hand-held counters to measure levels.
“This will undeniably affect trust in these organisations and raise questions of competency,” said Louis Rynsard, a director at the corporate communications agency SBC London.
“The long-lasting impact of a cyberattack cannot be overstated,” he said.
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The fight against cyberattacks has sparked exponential growth in global protection spending, with the cyber security market estimated at $120 billion this year, more than 30 times its size just over a decade ago.
But even that massive figure looks set to be dwarfed within a few years, experts said, after ransomware attacks crippled computers worldwide in the past week.
