No fewer than 150 countries have so far been hit in the biggest cyber-attack the world has ever witnessed.
The attack which began on Friday, May
12, 2017 is still claiming victims and there are fears that the attack
could be worse on Monday when people return to work.
The head of the European Union’s law
enforcement agency Europol, speaking on British TV on Sunday, May 14,
2017 said Friday’s attack was “unprecedented” in its reach, with more
than 200,000 victims in at least 150 countries.
“At the moment, we’re in the face of an
escalating threat, the numbers are going up,” Europol director Rob
Wainwright told ITV’s Peston on Sunday program.
“I’m worried about how the numbers will continue to grow when people go to work and turn their machines on Monday morning.”
Organizations around the world have
spent the weekend trying to recover after being hit by a virus that
seeks to seize control of computers until victims pay a ransom.
Hospitals, major companies and
government offices were among those that were badly affected.
Cyber-security experts have said the majority of the attacks targeted
Russia, Ukraine and Taiwan.
But U.K. hospitals, Chinese universities and global firms like Fedex (FDX) also reported they had come under assault.
Security experts said the spread of the
virus had been inadvertently stopped late Friday. The ransomware was
designed to repeatedly contact an unregistered domain in its code.
A 22-year-old security researcher in the
U.K, who goes by MalwareTech, registered that domain to analyze the
attack, but it turned out the ransomware needed it to remain
unregistered to keep spreading.
However, a hacker could change the code to remove the domain and try the ransomware attack again.
And it has potential to create much more
damage because it’s likely to be lurking on computers in offices around
the world that haven’t been used since Friday. Copycat attacks could
follow.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin,
at a meeting in Italy, said Saturday the attack was a reminder of the
importance of cybersecurity.
“It’s a big priority of mine that we protect the financial infrastructure,” he said.
Europol’s Wainwright underscored the
point Sunday. All sectors of the economy were vulnerable and
organizations could take lessons from the banking industry, which
appeared to have largely escaped the global attack.
“Very few banks if any have been
affected because they’ve learned from painful experience of being the
number one target for cybercrime,” he said.
The ransomware, called WannaCry, locks
down files on an infected computer and asks the computer’s administrator
to pay in order to regain control of them.
The exploit was leaked last month as part of a trove of NSA spy tools.
The ransomware is spread by taking
advantage of a Windows vulnerability that Microsoft (MSFT, Tech30)
released a security patch for in March.
But computers and networks that hadn’t updated their systems were still at risk.
In the wake of the attack, Microsoft
said it had taken the “highly unusual step” of releasing a patch for
computers running older operating systems including Windows XP, Windows 8
and Windows Server 2003.
The patches won’t do any good for machines that have already been hit.
On Saturday, experts said it appeared
that the ransomware had made just over $20,000, although they expected
that number to pop when people went back into the office Monday.
Security agencies have so far not been
able to identify who was behind the attack. Wainwright said Europol did
not know the motive.
He added that ransomware attacks were
normally criminal rather than political in nature. “Remarkably few
payments” had so far been made in response to this attack, he added.
Read more at CNN.
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