It has been barely a month since the ransomware known as WannaCry has been averted. However, a new threat has already appeared and is unfolding its wings even as we speak. The new attack also seems to ride on the shoulders of a ransomware and is attacking businesses and governments — Petya.
The ransomware seems to have its center in Ukraine. However, reports suggest that it is affecting computers as far away as Spain, France, Russia and India. And if WannaCry is anything to go by, this could well be just the beginning of the whole mess.
An official, Ukrainian Twitter account said:
Some of our gov agencies, private firms were hit by a virus. No need to panic, we’re putting utmost efforts to tackle the issue.
This particular ransomware is called Petya and is using the EternalBlue exploit to spread. This is actually kind of uprising since Petya has been available on the dark web since quite somewhile and no one expected it to cause so much trouble over the Internet.
Petya was known to be RaaS (Ransomware-as-a-Service), selling on Tor hidden services. Looks like WannaCry copycat. Attribution will be hard. pic.twitter.com/W5voMeNx9I
— x0rz (@x0rz) June 27, 2017
What’s even worse, is the fact that government’s do not seem to have taken WannaCry’s attack seriously enough. And now that they are being held hostage by a computer program, they are probably wishing they had made sure that the patch was applied on their computers.
