Yahoo – AFP,
Oleksandr Savochenko with Maria Antonova in Moscow and AFP bureaus, June 27,
2017
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| Ukraine's central bank said a cyberattack hit several lenders in the country, hindering operations and leading the regulator to warn other financial institutions to tighten security measures (AFP Photo/Kirill KUDRYAVTSEV) |
Kiev (AFP)
- A global wave of cyberattacks that began in Russia and Ukraine on Tuesday
wrought havoc on government and corporate computer systems as it spread to
Western Europe and across the Atlantic.
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.
The first
reports of trouble came from Ukrainian banks, Kiev's main airport and Rosneft,
in a major incident reminiscent of the recent WannaCry virus.
Some 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.
'Spreading round the world'
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.
"We
confirm our company's computer network was compromised today as part of a
global hack. Other organizations have also been affected," Merck said on Twitter.
"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.
'Powerful' attack
Ukrainian
Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman wrote on Facebook that the attacks in his
country were "unprecedented" but insisted that "important
systems were not affected."
However,
the radiation monitoring system at Ukraine's Chernobyl nuclear site has been
taken offline after it was targeted in the attack, forcing employees to use
hand-held counters to measure levels, officials said Tuesday.
The technological
systems were working "as usual" at the plant that exploded in 1986,
however.
The attacks
started around 2:00 pm Moscow time (1100GMT) and quickly spread to 80 companies
in Ukraine and Russia, said cybersecurity company Group IB.
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, Group IB said.
The
cryptolocker demands $300 in bitcoins and does not name the encrypting program,
which makes finding a solution difficult, Group IB spokesman Evgeny Gukov said.
Ukraine's
central bank said several lenders had been hit in the country, hindering
operations and leading the regulator to warn other financial institutions to
tighten security measures.
Banks were
experiencing "difficulty in servicing customers and performing banking
operations" due to the attacks, the bank said in a statement.
Rosneft
said earlier that its servers suffered a "powerful" cyberattack but
thanks to its backup system "the production and extraction of oil were not
stopped."
The wave of
cyberattacks also impacted Maersk, a global cargo shipping company;
Saint-Gobain, a French company producing glass and other construction
materials; and British-based WPP.
In
Amsterdam, the Dutch parcel delivery company TNT, which operates in 200
countries around the world, said its systems had been affected. "We are
assessing the situation and are implementing remediation steps as quickly as
possible," the company, part of FedEx, said in a statement to AFP.
Signs of
sophistication
Experts
also said this latest attack could heighten fears that companies may be more
vulnerable to cyberattacks than suspected, potentially putting personal data at
risk.
"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.
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.
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