WannaCry should have been a major warning to the world about ransomware. Then the GoldenEye strain of Petya ransomware arrived. What’s next?
Thousands of computers around the world are getting locked up by a fast-spreading ransomware. Big businesses are getting hit. An entire hospital is shut out of its system. Suddenly, it’s everywhere: the next big ransomware attack.
Here we go again. And again and again and again and again.
GoldenEye, a new strain of the Petya ransomware, took the world by storm on Tuesday after starting with a cyberattack in Kiev, Ukraine. From there, it spread to the country’s electrical grid, airport and government offices. At the Chernobyl nuclear disaster site, workers had to monitor radiation manually because of the attack. And then it began to go global.
Russia’s largest oil production company, Rosneft, suffered a cyberattack. Denmark-based Maersk, the largest shipping company in the world, had to shut down several of its systems to prevent the attack from spreading. New Jersey-based Merck, one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world, also suffered a massive hack. FedEx’s TNT Express service was hit hard from the breach as well.
The list of affected victims goes on, just like it did when the WannaCry ransomware hit in May and locked up more than 200,000 computers across the globe.