Australia and NZ largely escape global cyber attack

Dame Fiona and the Care Quality Commission wrote to Mr Hunt to highlight a “lack of understanding of security issues”, the newspaper said, and that “the external cyber threat is becoming a bigger consideration”.

Beginning on Friday a piece of ransomware called “WannaCry” began spreading through thousands of computers, ripping through files and locking people out of their servers.

Shanghai’s Fudan University received reports that a large number of school computers were infected with the virus.

In each case, a pop-up window demanded payments of $300, or about 2,000 yuan, in order to free the files. That’s why it’s called ransomware.

“We take every single cyberattack on a Windows system seriously, and we’ve been working around the clock since Friday to help all our customers who have been affected by this incident”, he said.

The software tools to create the attack were revealed in April among a trove of NSA spy tools that were either leaked or stolen.

The National Security Agency (NSA) alerted Microsoft about the issue three months ago and Microsoft released an upgrade that patched the flaw, but many users were yet to run it, CNN reported.

“The very nature of this particular malware, this sort of ransomware attack, is very potent because unlike more routine ones this one has used a sort of worm to exploit the operating system and bolted on a ransomware so that it spread incredibly quickly in hours not weeks or days”, Wallace said.

On Monday morning, Europol announced more than 200,000 computers in at least 150 countries had been infected, including a dozen hospitals in England, a Spanish telco, the German rail network, the United Kingdom offices of FedEx and reportedly the Russian Interior Ministry.

National Health Service: At least sixteen NHS organizations have been hit, according to NHS Digital.

LONDON – Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt was warned in July previous year of the urgent need to update the NHS’ cybersecurity in order to avoid the sort of crippling cyberattack seen in British hospitals last week.

The UK is one of the worst-affected countries to be hit by Wannacry, which also attacked Germany’s rail network Deutsche Bahn, Spanish telecommunications operator Telefonica, US logistics giant FedEx and Russia’s interior ministry.

The ransomware exploited a vulnerability that has been patched in updates of recent versions of Windows since March. So even people with older computers should update them. The ransomware also “drops a file named ‘!Please Read Me!.txt’ that contains the text explaining what has happened [to the computer] and how to pay the ransom”. But next time, rather than ignore the pop-up urging you to install the latest software update, take the time to keep the bastards out.

He told BBC Breakfast the Government had put £1.2 billion into combating cyber attacks during the last strategic defence and security review, including a £50 million pot to support NHS IT networks.

MalwareTech blogger, who wants to remain anonymous, was hailed as an “accidental hero” after registering a domain name to track the spread of the virus, which actually ended up halting it.

Darien Huss, a 28-year-old research engineer who helped stop the malware’s spread, said he was “still anxious for what’s to come in the next few days, because it really would not be so hard for the actors behind this to re-release their code without a kill switch or with a better kill switch”.