New cyber chaos appears to have been avoided in Europe: Europol

A screenshot of the warning screen from Friday’s ransomware attack. @malwaretechblog’s accidental kill switch and the arrival of the weekend gave individuals and organizations some room to breathe. The central bank reportedly said those monitoring the cyberattacks found “no incidents compromising data resources of banking institutions”.

Infected computers appear to largely be out-of-date devices that organizations deemed not worth the price of upgrading or, in some cases, machines involved in manufacturing or hospital functions that proved too hard to patch without possibly disrupting crucial operations, security experts said.

What is all the fuss about?

Have you paid the ransom? In the case of WannaCry, the amount could be anywhere between 300$-600$.

Senior security staff held another meeting in the White House Situation Room on Saturday, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation and National Security Agency were trying to identify the perpetrators of the massive cyber attack, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, stated Reuters.

WannaCry developers have prepared a Q&A section in various languages, offering infected users localised instructions on how to recover data and how to pay the ransom.

In total 47 NHS organisations reported being affected – and the disruption will continue into the new working week. But that apparently is not the case for governments in other countries such as Russian Federation, which has reported attempted breaches at a number of agencies. Among those hit were Russia’s Interior Ministry and companies including Spain’s Telefonica and FedEx Corp.in the U.S.

The British government said 48 of 248 health service trusts, the bodies that run the hospitals in England, had been impacted by Friday’s attack.

Reuters reported that U.S President Donald Trump ordered his homeland security adviser, Tom Bossert, to hold an emergency meeting Friday night to assess the threat posed by the ransomware attack. Companies including Hitachi and Nissan Motor Co. reported problems but said they said had not seriously affected their business operations.

But he also placed fault in national governments.

We should take from this recent attack a renewed determination for more urgent collective action.

Is India prepared for this cyber attack? “We have seen vulnerabilities stored by the Central Intelligence Agency show up on WikiLeaks, and now this vulnerability stolen from the NSA has affected customers around the world”, Smith wrote.

“[This] attack provides yet another example of why the stockpiling of vulnerabilities by governments is such a problem”, Microsoft said in a blog post. This makes the vulnerabilities remain open a lot longer and make things easier for hackers to get in.

“We’re in the face of an escalating threat, the numbers are going up”, he said, and added that the current attack was unprecedented.

NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden also took to Twitter to lambast the NSA.

In Indonesia, the ransomware hit computers in at least two hospitals, prompting the Indonesian government to urge businesses to update computer security. “There’s no waving that away”, he said.

Not sure if you are at risk from the cyber attack? That’s like the basic 101 to avoid any cyber-attack.

It exploited a vulnerability in the Windows operating system believed to have been developed by the National Security Agency, which became public last month.

The initial attack was stifled when a security researcher disabled a key mechanism used by the worm to spread, but experts said the hackers were likely to mount a second attack because so many users of personal computers with Microsoft operating systems couldn’t or didn’t download a security patch released in March that Microsoft had labelled “critical”.