Last week’s cyberattacks affected airplanes in Ukraine, FedEx deliveries in Europe, and container shipping around the world, according to Robert McMillan in The Wall Street Journal. He describes this latest attack as similar to but more sophisticated than the WannaCry virus attack in May. That attack hit Britain’s National Health Service particularly hard.
McMillan describes last week’s attack as disguised as ransomware—mimicking malicious software called Petya—“But that appears to have been a ruse,” he writes. He quotes Juan Andrés Guerrero-Saade, a security researcher with antivirus vendor Kaspersky Lab ZAO, as saying, “The attackers have no actual means of decrypting the files. It’s masquerading as a ransomware.”
Pavel Polityuk and Eric Auchard at Reuters say some experts dub the new virus NotPetya and cite a Ukrainian police official as saying Ukraine’s computer infrastructure may have been the primary target.
They write, “A growing consensus among security researchers, armed with technical evidence, suggests the main purpose of the attack was to install new malware on computers at government and commercial organizations in Ukraine. Rather than extortion, the goal may be to plant the seeds of future sabotage, experts said.”
Howard Amos of the Associated Press reports via ABC News that Ukraine has accused Russian security services of planning and launching the attack. However, Polityuk and Auchard at Reuters report, “Some cyber security researchers have said the fact that the Kremlin’s two flagship energy companies are victims of the attack could suggest Moscow was not behind it.”
