WORLD COMPUTERS HIT BY NEW RANSOM VIRUS.

PARIS • A new and highly virulent outbreak of malicious data-scrambling software appears to be causing mass disruption across the world, hitting companies and governments in Europe especially hard.

Officials in Ukraine reported serious intrusions of the country’s power grid as well as at banks and government offices, where one senior executive posted a photo of a darkened computer screen and the words, “the whole network is down.”

The prime minister cautioned that the country’s “vital systems” hadn’t been affected.

Russia’s Rosneft oil company also reported falling victim to hacking and said it had narrowly avoided major damage, as did Danish shipping giant A.P. MollerMaersk.

“We are talking about a cyberattack,” said Anders Rosendahl, a spokesman for the Copenhagen-based shipping group. “It has affected all branches of our business, at home and abroad.”

The attack was confirmed to have spread beyond Europe when U.S. drugmaker Merck, based in New Jersey, said its systems had also been compromised.

The number of companies and agencies reportedly affected by the ransomware campaign was piling up fast, and the electronic rampage appeared to be rapidly snowballing into a worldwide crisis.

Victor Zhora, CEO of Infosafe IT in Kyiv, says he believed the ransomware, which attacks Microsoft operating systems from Windows XP to Windows 10, was previously seeded and timeactivated.

“It seems the virus is spreading all over Europe and I’m afraid it can harm the whole world,” he said.

Zhora said the ransomware demands $300 in Bitcoin.

“A massive ransomware campaign is currently unfolding worldwide,” said Romanian cybersecurity company Bitdefender, where analyst Bogdan Botezatu said that it appeared to be nearly identical to GoldenEye, one of a family of hostage-taking programs that has been circulating for months.

Some analysts were calling the new form of ransomware Petya.

It’s not clear whether or why the ransomware has suddenly become so much more potent, but Botezatu said that it was likely spreading automatically across a network, without the need for human interaction.

Such self-spreading software, often called “worms,” are particularly feared because they can replicate rapidly, like a contagious disease.

“It’s like somebody sneezing into a train full of people,” Botezatu told The Associated Press. “You just have to exist there and you’re vulnerable.”