World braces for more cyberattacks as work week begins

Authorities fear another wave of the “WannaCry” ransomware could hit systems as people return to work and switch on their computers. More than 200,000 computers in more than 150 countries have so far been infected, according to the European Union’s law enforcement agency.

He said most people “are living an online life”, and these agencies have a duty to protect their countries’ citizens in that realm as well. And while Microsoft said it had already released a security update to patch the vulnerability one month earlier, the sequence of events fed speculation that the NSA hadn’t told the USA tech giant about the security risk until after it had been stolen.

The malware includes an encryption package that automatically downloads itself to infected computers, locking up almost all of the machines’ files and demanding payment of $300 to $600 for a key to unlock them.

The phenomenon of companies failing to update their systems has been a persistent security problem for years. Wainwright said Europol did not know the motive.

He said tech companies, customers and the government need to “work together” to protect against attacks. The WannaCry attack should give urgency to boosting cyber security.

“Hundreds of thousands” of Chinese computers at almost 30,000 institutions including government agencies have been hit by the global ransomware attack, a leading Chinese security-software provider has said, though the Asian impact has otherwise been relatively muted.

The indiscriminate attack began Friday and struck banks, hospitals and government agencies, exploiting known vulnerabilities in older Microsoft computer operating systems.

A message informing visitors of a cyber attack is displayed on the NHS website on May 12.

“When any technique is shown to be effective, there are nearly always copycats”, said Steve Grobman, chief technology officer of McAfee, a security company in Santa Clara, California. Its hackers demanded an initial ransom of $300 but later it increased the ransom up to $600 in Bitcoin. But these worm attacks became harder to pull off as computer owners and software makers shored up their defenses. Backups often are also out of date and missing critical information. Bloomberg Businessweek wrote in 2015 about a spate of malware infections at hospitals where radiological machines, blood-gas analyzers and other devices were compromised and used to siphon off the personal data of patients. The ease of stopping the attack suggests the hackers were new to this game.

Europol said a special task force at its European Cybercrime Centre was “specially created to assist in such investigations and will play an important role in supporting the investigation”.

Nissan: The carmaker said in a statement that “some Nissan entities were recently targeted” but “there has been no major impact on our business”.

Indonesia’s government reported two hospitals in Jakarta were affected.

The ransomware is spread by taking advantage of a Windows vulnerability that Microsoft (MSFT, Tech30) released a security patch for in March.

Ryan Kalember, senior vice president at Proofpoint Inc. which helped stop its spread, said the version without a kill switch was able to spread but was benign because it contained a flaw that wouldn’t allow it to take over a computer and demand ransom to unlock files.

At the moment, all PCs that do not have the latest Microsoft security updates are vulnerable to attack by the ransomware. The virus took control of users’ files, demanding payments to restore access. Yet in an unusual step, they released a patch for those older systems because of the magnitude of the outbreak.

All told, several cybersecurity firms said they had identified the malicious software, which so far has been responsible for tens of thousands of attacks, in more than 60 countries.

“Ransomware is traditionally their topic”, he said.

Barts Health, which runs five hospitals in London, said Sunday it was still experiencing disruption to its computer systems and it asked for the public to use other NHS services wherever possible.