More than eighty companies in the Russia and Ukraine were previously affected by the Petya virus that disabled computers Tuesday and told users to pay $300 in cryptocurrency to unlock them, in accordance with the Moscow-based cybersecurity company Group-IB. Telecommunications operators and retailers were also impacted and the virus is spreading in a similar way to the WannaCry attack in May, it said.
Rob Wainwright, executive director at Europol, said the agency is "urgently responding" to reports of the latest cyberattack. In a separate statement, Europol said it’s in talks with "member states and key industry partners to develop the complete nature of this attack at this time."
Kremlin-controlled Rosneft, Russia’s greatest crude producer, claimed in a statement that it avoided “serious consequences” from the “hacker attack” by switching to “a backup system for managing production processes.”
U.K. media company WPP Plc.’s website is down, and workers have been told to turn off their computers and not use WiFi, in accordance with a person familiar with the matter. Sea Containers, the London building that houses WPP and agencies including Ogilvy & Mather, has been shut down, another person said. “IT systems in various WPP companies have been affected,” the company claimed in emailed statement.
Global Latest Cyberattack
The hack has rapidly spread from Russia and the Ukraine, through Europe and into the U.S. A.P. Moller-Maersk, operator of the world’s largest container line, said its customers cannot use online booking tools and its internal systems are down. The attack is affecting several sites and units, which involve a major port operator and an oil and gas producer, spokeswoman Concepcion Boo Arias said by phone.
APM Terminals, owned by Maersk, are experiencing system problems at multiple terminals, involving the Port of New York and New Jersey, the greatest port on the U.S. East Coast, and Rotterdam in The Netherlands, Europe’s largest harbor.
Cie de Saint-Gobain, a French manufacturer, said its systems had also been infected, though a spokeswoman refused to elaborate, while Mondelez International Inc. claimed was also experiencing a global IT outage and was searching into the cause. Merck & Co. Inc., based in Kenilworth, New Jersey, has also reported that its computer network was compromised due to the hack.
WannaCry Warnings
The strikes follow the global ransomware assault including the WannaCry virus that affected hundreds of thousands of computers in more than 150 countries as extortionists claimed $300 in bitcoin from victims. Ransomware attacks have been soaring and the number of such tragedies increased by 50 percent in the year of 2016, according to Verizon Communications Inc.
Analysts at Symantec Corp., have said the new virus, called Petya, uses an exploit called EternalBlue to spread, much like WannaCry. EternalBlue works on vulnerabilities in Microsoft Corp.’s Windows operating system.
The latest virus has a fake Microsoft digital signature appended to it and the attack is spreading to several countries, Costin Raiu, director of the global research and analysis team at Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab, said on Twitter.
The latest cyberattack has hit Ukraine particularly hard. The intrusion is “the greatest in Ukraine’s history,” Anton Gerashchenko, an aide to the Interior Ministry, wrote on Facebook. The goal was “the destabilization of the economic situation and in the civic consciousness of Ukraine,” though it was “disguised as an extortion attempt,” he claimed.
Kyivenergo, a Ukrainian utility, switched off all computers after the hack, while another power company, Ukrenergo, was also impacted, though “not seriously,” the Interfax news service reported.
Ukrainian delivery network Nova Poshta halted service to clients after its network was infected, the company claimed on Facebook. Ukraine’s Central Bank warned on its website that various banks had been targeted by hackers.
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