Displaying items by tag: Petya

A year after a leaked NSA Windows exploit known as EternalBlue was used to create the WannaCry ransomware that caused chaos around the world, a security researcher says it is being used more than ever by attackers in crafting threats.

Britain has formally blamed Russia for the NotPetya ransomware attack in June last year, with Foreign Office Minister Lord Ahmad saying the decision "underlines the fact that the UK and its allies will not tolerate malicious cyber activity".

Almost half of all cyber crime targets small businesses in Australia, according to a newly released Australian Government pamphlet designed to raise awareness of cyber crime and help small businesses achieve better cyber security preparedness.

WannaCry was the Windows ransomware that gained the most media coverage this year but security vendor Webroot ranks NotPetya, the ransomware that hit a month later, as the nastiest in this category of Windows malware for 2016-17.

The container shipping company A.P. Moller–Maersk Group expects that a Windows ransomware attack it suffered in June will cost it between US$200 million and US$300 million.

While the WannaCry ransomware scare was a wake-up call for many, the Petya/NotPetya outbreak just a few weeks later quickly showed that many organisations are still asleep when it comes to protection against modern ransomware.

The people behind the last malware attack, which began in Europe and then spread to other regions, appear to be trying to play down the theory that the attack was masterminded by a nation state.

The people behind the latest malware outbreak probably had access to NSA exploits — which were used to craft the malicious code — well before the Shadow Brokers dumped them on the Web in April, researchers from the Finnish security firm F-Secure claim.

Security firms have changed tack on the massive ransomware attack that hit Europe on Tuesday and spread to other countries, saying that it was intended to destroy data in specific locations and not to extort money.

When a disastrous ransomware attack is devastating computers across the globe, based on a five-year-old NSA discovered vulnerability, where’s Microsoft?