12 countries hit in massive cyber-heist

England’s healthcare system came under a withering cyberattack Friday morning, with “at least 25” hospitals across the country falling prey to ransomware that locked doctors and employees out of critical systems and networks. The UK government now reports that this is not a (relatively) isolated attack but rather a single front in a massive regionwide digital assault.

#nhscyberattack pic.twitter.com/SovgQejl3X

— gigi.h (@fendifille) May 12, 2017

The attack has impacted hospitals and transportation infrastructure across Europe, Russia and Asia. Britain and 11 other countries including Turkey, Vietnam, Spain, Portugal, the Philippines, Japan and Russia, have all been hit with the same ransomware program, a variant of the WannaCry virus, spouting the same ransom note and demanding $300 for the encryption key.

The virus’s infection vector appears to through a known vulnerability, originally exploited and developed by the National Security Agency. That information was subsequently leaked by the hacking group known as Shadow Broker which has been dumping its cache of purloined NSA hacking tools onto the internet since last year. The virus was spread via email as compressed file attachment so, like last week’s Google Docs SNAFU, make sure you confirm that you email’s attachments are legit before clicking on them.

Source: NY Times