Huge Cyberattack spreads across Europe

Ransomware known as Petya seems to have re-emerged to affect computer systems across Europe, causing issues primarily in Ukraine, Russia, England and India, a Swiss government information technology agency said on Tuesday.

"There have been indications of late that Petya is in circulation again, exploiting the SMB (Server Message Block) vulnerability," the Swiss Reporting and Analysis Centre for Information Assurance (MELANI) said in an e-mail.
It said it had no information that Swiss companies had been impacted, but said it was following the situation. The Petya virus was blamed for disrupting systems in 2016.

The virus is believed to be ransomware – a piece of malicious software that shuts down a computer system and then demands an extortionate sum of money to fix the problem. 

The hack has already caused widespread disruption across Europe, hitting Ukraine especially hard. Ukraine thus far seems to be the hardest hit. Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Pavlo Rozenko called the cyberattack "unprecedented" but "vital systems haven't been affected. He said on Tuesday that the government's computer network was down, and posted a picture on Twitter of a computer screen showing an error message.

Ukrainian institutions were hit by a wave of cyber attacks earlier in the day, including banks, the state energy distributor and Kiev's main airport.

However, Russia's Rosneft energy company also reported falling victim to the hacking, saying it had narrowly avoided major damage. 

"The hacking attack could have led to serious consequences but neither the oil production nor the processing has been affected thanks to the fact that the company has switched to a reserve control system," the company said.  

The world is still recovering from the springtime WannaCry outbreak, which spread rapidly using digital break-in tools originally created by the U.S. National Security Agency but leaked to the web.