Experts say global cyberattack sought to create Ukraine chaos

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,” said Gavin O’Gorman, an investigator with U.S. antivirus firm Symantec. “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, energy companies, railways, banks, supermarkets and other organizations were sent reeling.

Many of these groups had recovered by Thursday.

The program 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 $10,000.

The attack came the same day as the assassination of a senior Ukrainian military intelligence officer and a day before a national holiday celebrating the new Ukrainian Constitution signed after the breakup of the Soviet Union.

Tensions have been running high between Russia and Ukraine, with Moscow seizing Crimea in 2014 and pro-Russian separatists fighting government forces for control of eastern Ukraine.