Friday’s global cyber-attack has affected more than 200,000 victims in 150 countries, Europol chief Rob Wainwright said on Sunday.
“The latest count is over 200,000 victims in at least 150 countries. Many of those victims will be businesses, including large corporations. The global reach is unprecedented,” BBC quoted Wainwright as saying in an interview with Britain’s ITV.
Wainwright said he was concerned that the numbers of those affected would continue to rise when people returned to work on Monday morning.
“We’re in the face of an escalating threat, the numbers are going up,” he said, and added that the current attack was unprecedented.
“We are running around 200 global operations against cyber crime each year but we’ve never seen anything like this,” he added.
However, Wainwright said so far “remarkably few” payments had been made by the victims of the attack.
Friday’s attack was the latest in the growing menace of ransomware in which hackers deliver files to computers that automatically encrypt their data, making it unusable until a ransom is paid.
The latest malware, called WannaCrypt or WannaCry, is spread by taking advantage of a Windows vulnerability that Microsoft released a security patch for in March. But computers and networks that didn’t update their systems remained at risk.
Russia and Britain were among the worst-hit countries by the attack.
Security experts have warned that another attack is imminent, most likely on Monday, and could be unstoppable.
India
The government on Sunday said it has activated a “preparedness and response mechanism” to prevent any major cyber attack from a new ransomware — “Wannacry” — which has infected computer systems around the world.
According to the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), it has activated a “preparedness and response mechanism” by instructing CERT-IN (Computer Emergency Response Team) to gather “all the information of the reported ransomware”.
Just a few days ago a global cyber attack was launched using the “WannaCry” ransomware. The malicious software infects a computer and restricts users’ access to it until a ransom is paid to unlock it.
On May 13, CERT-IN had issued an advisory for both reactive and preventive actions to deal with the ransomware.
“MeitY has initiated contact with relevant stakeholders in public and private sector to ‘patch’ their systems as prescribed in the advisory issued by CERT-IN. MeitY has also requested Microsoft India to inform all their partners and customers to apply relevant patches,” the ministry said in a statement.
“In India, no reports have been formally received so far regarding this ransomware attack. However, it is understood that a few systems of the police department in Andhra Pradesh were impacted. MeitY has informed AP government, to follow the CERT-In advisory.”
As per the Cyber Swachhta Kendra (Botnet Cleaning and Malware Analysis Centre), ransomware spreads by using a vulnerability in implementations of “Server Message Block” (SMB) in Windows systems.
IANS
