A security camera stands outside the main Telefonica headquarters in Madrid, Spain, Friday, May 12, 2017.
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Friday’s attack largely hit businesses and large organizations: United Kingdom hospitals, a Spanish telecom, FedEx, the Russian Interior Ministry, and more. The British Home Secretary said most of the NHS systems were back to normal by midday Saturday. Here are some quick facts about the WannaCry attack and suggestions for avoiding it. Russia’s Interior Ministry and companies including Spain’s Telefonica, FedEx Corp.in the USA and French carmaker Renault all reported troubles.
Government agencies and universities were among those hit as well as petrol stations, ATMs and hospitals, it said.
In an interview on ABC’s “This Week”, Clapper said the worry was “this ransomware attack will be even larger” as people return to their desks after the weekend. And it’s expected to cause more problems on Monday.
Matthew Hickey, cofounder of security firm My Hacker House, created a virtual inoculation for companies to use to prevent ransomware while they work on patching.
Other countries, including Portugal, Japan, the Philippines, Turkey and Vietnam, also reported attacks, The New York Times reported on Friday.
Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) Director General Sanjay Bahl told news agency PTI that a list of do’s and don’ts has been shared with all vital installations and networks, including banks, stock markets, airports, defence, power and public utilities.
Hitachi: The Japanese electronics firm said Monday that its computer systems have been experiencing problems since the weekend, including not being able to send and receive emails or open attached files.
Chinese state media said 29,372 institutions there had been infected along with hundreds of thousands of devices.
India is at increasing risk of falling prey to ransomware, the malware that has been ravaging computer systems worldwide.
In China, “hundreds of thousands” of computers at almost 30,000 institutions and organisations were infected by late Saturday, according to Qihoo 360, one of China’s largest providers of antivirus software.
Experts were scrambling to determine who was behind the attack, which exploited a security flaw in older versions of Microsoft’s Windows operating software. Have you paid the ransom?
The ransomware campaign – which has gone through at least two phases as researchers worked to halt its advance – mostly affected Europe and Asia.
Ryan Kalember, senior vice-president at Proofpoint Inc.
“We haven’t fully dodged this bullet at all until we’re patched against the vulnerability itself”, Kalember said.
The ransomware, called WannaCry, locks down files on an infected computer and asks the computer’s administrator to pay in order to regain control of them. After so many days the ransomware could totally wipe out your data.
The WannaCry “ransomware” attack, which began on May 12, disrupted hospitals, banks, shops, schools, and government agencies in more than 150 countries, attacking through vulnerabilities in older versions of Microsoft computer operating systems. “The numbers are still going up”, he said.
In a blog post on Sunday, Microsoft President Brad Smith appeared to tacitly acknowledge what researchers had already widely concluded: The ransomware attack leveraged a hacking tool, built by the US National Security Agency, that leaked online in April. Although the spread of the attacks was stopped, experts have warned people to brace for renewed and imminent waves of attacks.
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Op Gen Oorth said Monday it was still “a bit early too say who is behind it, but we are working on a decrypting tool”. The ransomware is automatically scanning for computers it can infect whenever it loads itself onto a new machine.
