Global cyberattack may have aimed for havoc, not extortion

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 hardpressed 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.

Others, such as Russian anti-virus firm Kaspersky Lab, said clues in the code suggest the program’s authors would have been incapable of decrypting the data, further indicating the ransom demands may have been a smoke screen.

The timing was intriguing too: 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.

Russia has long been suspected of engineering earlier cyberattacks against Ukraine, including the hack of its voting system ahead of 2014 national elections and an assault that knocked its power grid offline in 2015.

Ransomware or not, computer specialists worldwide were still wrestling with its consequences, with varying degrees of success.