Attack goes global
Governments, companies in Europe hit especially hard in latest ransomware attack
PARIS — A new and highly virulent outbreak of data-scrambling software caused disruption across the world Tuesday.
Ukraine and other parts of Europe were hit particularly hard by the new strain of ransomware — malicious software that locks up computer files with all-but-unbreakable encryption and then demands a ransom for its release. As the malware began to spread across the U.S., it affected companies such as the drugmaker Merck and Mondelez International, the owner of food brands such as Oreo and Nabisco. But its pace appeared to slow as the day wore on.
The origins of the malware remain unclear. Researchers picking the program apart found evidence its creators had borrowed from leaked National Security Agency code, raising the possibility that the digital havoc had spread using U.S. taxpayer-funded tools.
“The virus is spreading all over Europe and I’m afraid it can harm the whole world,” said Victor Zhora, the chief executive of Infosafe IT in Kyiv, where reports of the malicious software first emerged earlier on Tuesday.
In Ukraine, victims included toplevel government offices; energy companies; banks; and even cash machines, gas stations, and supermarkets. Multinational companies, including the global law firm DLA Piper and Danish shipping giant A.P. Moller-Maersk were also affected, although the firms didn’t specify the extent of the damage.
In the U.S., a hospital in western Pennsylvania said it was dealing with a “widespread” cyberattack, but didn’t immediately release further details.
Security experts said Tuesday’s global cyberattack shares something in common with last month’s outbreak of ransomware, dubbed WannaCry : Both spread using digital lockpicks originally created by the NSA and later published to the web by a still-mysterious group known as the Shadowbrokers.
Security vendors including Bitdefender and Kaspersky said the NSA exploit is allowing malware to spread rapidly by itself across internal computer networks at companies and other large organizations. Microsoft issued a security fix in March, but Chris Wysopal, chief technology officer at the security firm Veracode, warned that would only be effective if 100 per cent of computers on a company’s network were patched, saying that if one computer were infected, the malware could use a backup mechanism to spread to patched computers as well.
“It’s like somebody sneezing into a train full of people,” Bogdan Botezatu, an analyst with Bitdefender, said. “You just have to exist there and you’re vulnerable.”
The motives of those behind the malware remain unknown. E-mails sent to an address posted to the bottom of ransom demands went unreturned. That might be because the e-mail provider hosting that address, Berlinbased Posteo, pulled the plug on the account before the infection became widely known.
In an e-mail, a Posteo representative said it had blocked the e-mail address “immediately” after learning that it was associated with ransomware. The company added that it was in contact with German authorities “to make sure that we react properly.”
The blocked address may make it difficult for hackers to capitalize on the digital havoc, but it may also complicate victims’ attempts to retrieve their data. Without the hackers’ decryption key — or the discovery of some weakness in the malware’s code — the encrypted data may stay scrambled for a long time yet.