HITS 5 COUNTRIES

to be relatively small.

Ukraine’s Odessa International Airport said on Facebook that its “information system” stopped functioning in the afternoon.

“All airport services are working in a reinforced security regime,” it said.

Its website showed air traffic going in and out of the Black Sea resort city on schedule.

Russia’s Interfax news agency, one of the country’s biggest, also sent its last dispatch at 2.13pm before falling silent.

It did not resume service by 11pm, and its internet site remained inaccessible.

A Moscow cybersecurity expert said the Fontanka news site in Saint Petersburg and a third media outlet “whose name, unfortunately, we cannot reveal at this time” had also gone offline.

Yevgeny Gukov, of the GroupIB IT security firm, said the malware appeared to use an encryption scheme that prevented analysts from deciphering the malicious code.

Kaspersky Lab said the “ransomware infects devices through a number of hacked Russian media websites”.

“Based on our investigation, this has been a targeted attack against corporate networks, using methods similar to those used during the (NotPetya) attack,” Kaspersky Lab said.

US-based ESET cybersecurity group said it also detected “a new variant of ransomware known also as Petya”.

The “NotPetya” attack in July was a modified version of the “Petya” ransomware that hit last year and demanded money from victims in exchange for the return of computer data.

But there appeared to be some confusion about the nature of the new cyber threat facing Europe.

ESET said the malware “uses the Mimikatz tool to extract credentials from the affected systems”.

But the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) said its IT experts detected a phishing attack that attempted to obtain sensitive personal details, such as passwords, through emails.

SBU said culprits used “emails with return addresses associated with the technical support service of Microsoft”.

Mircorsoft issued no immediate comment.

SBU said “the spread of the virus stopped” in Ukraine. AFP