Global cyberattack may have aimed for havoc, not extortion

PARIS — The cyberattack that has locked up computers around the world while demanding a ransom may not be an extortion attempt after all, but an effort to create havoc in Ukraine, security experts say.

“There may be a more nefarious motive behind the attack,” Gavin O’Gorman, an investigator with U.S. antivirus firm Symantec, said in a blog post. “Perhaps this attack was never intended to make money, rather to simply disrupt a large number of Ukrainian organizations.”

The rogue program landed its heaviest blows on the Eastern European nation, where the government, dozens of banks and other institutions were sent reeling. It disabled computers at government agencies, energy companies, cash machines, supermarkets, railways and communications providers. Many of these organizations had recovered by Thursday.

The program, known by a variety of names, including NotPetya, initially appeared to be ransomware, a type of malicious software that encrypts its victims’ data and holds it hostage until a payment is made, usually in bitcoins, the hard-to-trace digital currency often used by criminals.

But O’Gorman and several other researchers said the culprits would have been hard-pressed to make money off the scheme. They appear to have relied on a single email address that was blocked almost immediately and a single bitcoin account that has collected the relatively puny sum of $10,000.