Up To 1 Million Devices Affected in Cyber Attack

A cyber attack launched over the weekend, called WannaCry, has now infected more than 300 000 computers worldwide and is expected to infect up to one million computers across the globe.

Various cyber security firms are calling it the ‘biggest cyber attack ever’ and certainly the largest attack of its kind this year.

The attack is modelled on ransomware and targets computers running the Microsoft Windows operating system.

The software virus spreads mainly through phishing scams and is reportedly demanding ransoms from the affected users in Bitcoin currency.

The malware works as a ‘captor’ by taking the user’s personal data – even if encrypted – hostage and demanding a payment from the user for the release of the data.

Big information technology companies have been affected by this virus, including FedEx, LATAM Airlines, the UK’s National Health Service as well as Telefonica, a large telecommunications company in Spain.

Spain has also reported that several other big companies in the country have been affected by the virus.

David Emm, a principal security researcher at security firm, Kaspersky Lab, said that because the virus affected so many computers at once, it is very likely to spread rapidly.

“The virus has affected so many machines globally and it is so widespread. It relies on an exploit (a chunk of data or a piece of software) which could have been prevented by installing a security update,” he said.

While the virus has affected several computers and continues to spread, a web security researcher, who goes under his blog name of ‘Malware Tech’, reportedly discovered a killswitch for the virus by accident by registering a website that was mentioned in the code of the malware.

This action has slowed spread of the infection, however, recent reports are suggesting that new versions of the malware have now been detected that are immune to the killswitch.