Hackers unleash PETYA cyberattack

paris — Petya, 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. Moller-Maersk. “We are talking about a cyberattack,” said Anders Rosendahl, a spokesman for the Copenhagenbased shipping group. “It has affected all branches of our business, at home and abroad.”

The attack was confirmed to have spread beyond Europe when US 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.

There’s very little information about what might be behind the disruption at each specific company, but cybersecurity experts rapidly zeroed in on a form of ransomware, the name given to programs that hold data hostage by scrambling it until a payment is made.