WannaCry virus hits Asia

london — The worldwide ‘ransomware’ cyber attack spread to thousands more computers on Monday as people across Asia logged in at work, disrupting businesses, schools, hospitals and daily life. But no new large-scale outbreaks were reported, and British officials said a feared second wave of infections had not materialised.

The new infections were largely in Asia, which had been closed for business when the malware first struck. In Britain, whose health service was among the first highprofile targets of the online extortion scheme, Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt said “we have not seen a second wave of attacks”.

The malware, known as ‘WannaCry’, paralysed computers running factories, banks, government agencies and transport systems, hitting 200,000 victims in more than 150 countries.

In Asia, where Friday’s attack occurred after business hours, thousands of new cases were reported on Monday. The Japan Computer Emergency Response Team Coordination Center, a nonprofit group, said 2,000 computers at 600 locations in Japan were affected. —

LONDON — A 22-year-old cyber expert who accidentally stopped the breach at the British National Health Service (NHS) has now been hired by the British National Cyber Security Centre to prevent further damage.

Marcus Hutchins, also known as ‘Malware Tech’, accidentally triggered a ‘kill switch’ that helped in stopping the ‘WannaCry’ ransomware attack from spreading further, telegraph.co.uk reported on Monday. It took Hutchins just a few hours to stop the breach but that had, by then, spread and crippled the NHS.

Hutchins was in his bedroom when he accidentally stopped the attack. “I will confess that I was unaware registering the domain would stop the malware until after I registered it, so initially it was accidental,” @ MalwareTechBlog tweeted.

The self-taught tech savy is believed to be living in south-west England. Hutchins joined a Los Angeles-based “private intel threat firm” a year ago. He said in a blog that he purchased a web domain for £8 and redirected it elsewhere to stop the ransowmware attack.

“My job is to look for ways we can track and potentially stop botnets (and other kinds of malware), so I’m always on the lookout to pick up unregistered malware control server (C2) domains,” Hutchins noted on his blog.

He has also told how he shunned university and instead self taught himself sophisticated hacking techniques. “I had planned to go to university but ended up getting offered a job in security a year prior, so I took it. I’m completely self-taught so in hindsight university would probably not have been worth the time or money,” The Guardian quoted Hutchins as saying. — IANS