A massive ransomware campaign appears to have infected a number of organisations around the world.<\/p>\n
Computers in thousands of locations have apparently been locked by a program that demands $300 (\u00a3230) in Bitcoin.<\/p>\n
There have been reports of infections in more than 70 countries, including the UK, US, China, Russia, Spain, Italy and Taiwan.<\/p>\n
Many security researchers are linking the incidents together.<\/p>\n
The UK’s National Health Service (NHS) was also hit by a ransomware outbreak on the same day and screenshots of the WannaCry program were shared by NHS staff.<\/p>\n
One cyber-security researcher tweeted that he had detected many thousands of cases of the ransomware – known as WannaCry and variants of that name – around the world.<\/p>\n
“This is huge,” said Jakub Kroustek at Avast.<\/p>\n
Another, at cyber-security firm Kaspersky, said that the ransomware had been spotted cropping up in 74 countries and that the number was still growing.<\/p>\n
There were a number of reports that Russia had seen more infections than any other single country.<\/p>\n
Several experts monitoring the situation have linked the infections to vulnerabilities released by a group known as The Shadow Brokers, which recently claimed to have dumped hacking tools stolen from the US National Security Agency (NSA).<\/p>\n
A patch for the vulnerability was released by Microsoft in March, but many systems may not have had the update installed.<\/p>\n
Some security researchers have pointed out that the infections seem to be deployed via a worm – a program that spreads by itself between computers.<\/p>\n
A number of Spanish firms were among the apparent victims elsewhere in Europe.<\/p>\n
Telecoms giant Telefonica said in a statement that it was aware of a “cybersecurity incident” but that clients and services had not been affected.<\/p>\n
Power firm Iberdrola and utility provider Gas Natural were also reported to have suffered from the outbreak.<\/p>\n
There were reports that staff at the firms were told to turn off their computers.<\/p>\n
–<\/p>\n
Source: BBC<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A massive ransomware campaign appears to have infected a number of organisations around the world. Computers in thousands of locations have apparently been locked by a program that demands $300 (\u00a3230) in Bitcoin. There have been reports of infections in more than 70 countries, including the UK, US, China, Russia, Spain, Italy and Taiwan. Many […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[106],"tags":[7083],"yoast_head":"\n