5-15-17

MONDAY MORNING RUSH? ASIAN BUSINESSES ALREADY HIT HARD!

Monday was expected to be a busy day, especially in Asia which may not have seen the worst of the impact yet, as companies and organizations turned on their computers.

“Expect to hear a lot more about this tomorrow morning when users are back in their offices and might fall for phishing emails” or other as yet unconfirmed ways the worm may propagate, said Christian Karam, a Singapore-based security researcher.

Targets both large and small have been hit.

Renault said on Saturday it had halted manufacturing at plants in Sandouville, France, and Romania to prevent the spread of ransomware in its systems.

Will the Stock Market and other infrastructures collapse on Monday from the Ransomware Virus?

“The global reach is unprecedented … and those victims, many of those will be businesses, including large corporations,” Europol Director Rob Wainwright told Britain’s ITV.

“At the moment, we are in the face of an escalating threat. The numbers are going up, I am worried about how the numbers will continue to grow when people go to work and turn (on) their machines on Monday morning.”

From Paul Begley

Breaking: “Business Brace For Monday Ransomware Threat”

From Associated Press

WH: Cyberattack Has Not Affected US Government

From Fox News

Governments around world convene after global cyberattack

Benjamin Hall reports from London

From Zachary K Hubbard

Trump orders preparation for Electric Grid cyber attacks, May 11, 2017, day before ‘WannaCry’ Virus

The Federal Government has been warning about terrorists taking down the U.S. power grid for a decade. Find out what is so curious about Trump’s order on this matter, the day before the ‘WannaCry’ virus “cyberattack”. 

‘WannaCry’ virus of May 12, 2017 is a Bavarian Illuminati ritual +Trump, Comey & Kissinger

From Paul Begley

Prophecy Alert: “Ransomware Virus A Precursor To The Mark Of The Beast”

“Worst-Ever Recorded” Ransomware Attack Strikes Over 57,000 Users Worldwide, Using NSA-Leaked Tools

Update 4: According to experts tracking and analyzing the worm and its spread, this could be one of the worst-ever recorded attacks of its kind. The security researcher who tweets and blogs as MalwareTech told The Intercept “I’ve never seen anything like this with ransomware,” and “the last worm of this degree I can remember is Conficker.” Conficker was a notorious Windows worm first spotted in 2008; it went on to infect over nine million computers in nearly 200 countries.As The Intercept details,

Today’s WannaCry attack appears to use an NSA exploit codenamed ETERNALBLUE, a software weapon that would have allowed the spy agency’s hackers to break into any of millions of Windows computers by exploiting a flaw in how certain version of Windows implemented a network protocol commonly used to share files and to print. Even though Microsoft fixed the ETERNALBLUE vulnerability in a March software update, the safety provided there relied on computer users keeping their systems current with the most recent updates. Clearly, as has always been the case, many people (including in governments) are not installing updates. Before, there would have been some solace in knowing that only enemies of the NSA would have to fear having ETERNALBLUE used against them–but from the moment the agency lost control of its own exploit last summer, there’s been no such assurance.

 

Today shows exactly what’s at stake when government hackers can’t keep their virtual weapons locked up.

 

As security researcher Matthew Hickey, who tracked the leaked NSA tools last month, put it, “I am actually surprised that a weaponized malware of this nature didn’t spread sooner.”

Update 3: Microsoft  has issued a statement, confirming the status the vulnerability:

Today our engineers added detection and protection against new malicious software known as Ransom:Win32.WannaCrypt.

 

In March, we provided a security update which provides additional protections against this potential attack.

 

Those who are running our free antivirus software and have Windows updates enabled, are protected. We are working with customers to provide additional assistance.

Update 2: Security firm Kaspersky Lab has recorded more than 45,000 attacks in 74 countries in the past 10 hours. Seventy-four countries around the globe have been affected, with the number of victims still growing, according to Kaspersky Lab. According to Avast, over 57,000 attacks have been detected worldwide, the company said, adding that it “quickly escalated into a massive spreading.”   READ MORE

Businesses brace for Monday as ransomware threat lingers

SINGAPORE/TORONTO (Reuters) – Technical staff scrambled on Sunday to patch computers and restore infected ones, amid fears that the ransomware worm that stopped car factories, hospitals, shops and schools could wreak fresh havoc on Monday when employees log back on.

Cybersecurity experts said the spread of the virus dubbed WannaCry – “ransomware” which locked up more than 200,000 computers – had slowed, but the respite might only be brief.

New versions of the worm are expected, they said, and the extent of the damage from Friday’s attack remains unclear.

Infected computers appear to largely be out-of-date devices that organizations deemed not worth the price of upgrading or, in some cases, machines involved in manufacturing or hospital functions that proved too difficult to patch without possibly disrupting crucial operations, security experts said.

Marin Ivezic, cybersecurity partner at PwC, said that some clients had been “working around the clock since the story broke” to restore systems and install software updates, or patches, or restore systems from backups.

Microsoft released patches last month and on Friday to fix a vulnerability that allowed the worm to spread across networks, a rare and powerful feature that caused infections to surge on Friday.

Code for exploiting that bug, which is known as “Eternal Blue,” was released on the internet in March by a hacking group known as the Shadow Brokers. The group claimed it was stolen from a repository of National Security Agency hacking tools. The agency has not responded to requests for comment.

Hong Kong-based Ivezic said that the ransomware was forcing some more “mature” clients affected by the worm to abandon their usual cautious testing of patches “to do unscheduled downtime and urgent patching, which is causing some inconvenience.”

He declined to identify which clients had been affected.

The head of the European Union police agency said on Sunday the cyber assault hit 200,000 victims in at least 150 countries and that number will grow when people return to work on Monday.

READ MORE

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