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.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“We are talking about a cyberattack,” said Anders Rosendahl, a spokesman for the Copenhagen-based shipping group. “It has affected all branches of our business, at home and abroad.”\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The attack was confirmed to have spread beyond Europe when U.S. drugmaker Merck, based in New Jersey, said its systems had also been compromised.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“A massive ransomware campaign is currently unfolding worldwide,” said Romanian cybersecurity company Bitdefender, where analyst Bogdan Botezatu said that it appeared to be nearly identical to GoldenEye, one of a family of hostage-taking programs that has been circulating for months. Some analysts were calling the new form of ransomware Petya.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It’s not clear whether or why the ransomware has suddenly become so much more potent, but Botezatu said that it was likely spreading automatically across a network, without the need for human interaction. Such self-spreading software, often called “worms,” are particularly feared because they can replicate rapidly, like a contagious disease.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“It’s like somebody sneezing into a train full of people,” Botezatu told The Associated Press. “You just have to exist there and you’re vulnerable.”\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The world is still recovering from a previous outbreak of ransomware, called WannaCry or WannaCrypt, which spread rapidly using digital break-in tools originally created by the U.S. National Security Agency and recently leaked to the web.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“Data breaches and cyber hacks are one of the biggest risks facing business worldwide,” said Michelle Crorie, a partner at law firm Clyde & Co. who specializes in cybersecurity issues. “The WannaCry attack and now Petya clearly demonstrate that hackers do not discriminate which type of business they are targeting.”\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This particular variant of ransomware leaves a message with a contact email; several messages sent to the address were not immediately returned.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Associated Press writers Vladimir Isachenkov in Moscow and Jan M. Olsen in Copenhagen, Denmark, contributed to this report.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":27597,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-noindex":"","_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-nofollow":"","_yoast_wpseo_canonical":"","_acf":"","_yoast_wpseo_primary_category":29,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_smg_distribution_targets":{"8":{"categories":[],"primary_category":""}}},"categories":[106,29,32],"tags":[],"coauthors":[1145],"class_list":["post-26473","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-daily-brief","category-home","category-newsletters"],"acf":{"subheadline":"","legacy_arc_id":"ZABYSXE64VH77ATWSOUFLOMKQA","arc_canonical_url":"\/home\/2017\/06\/27\/new-cyberattack-causes-mass-disruption-in-europe\/","remove_feature_photo":false,"is_sponsored":false,"subtype":"","redirect_url":"","disable_inline_ads":false,"native_logo_pretext":"Presented By:"},"yoast_head":"\n