Hacking Attack Has Security Experts Scrambling to Contain Fallout -
By MARK SCOTT and NICK WINGFIELDMAY 13, 2017
Governments, companies and security experts from China to Britain raced on Saturday to contain the fallout from an audacious global cyberattack amid fears
that if they did not succeed, companies would lose their data unless they met ransom demands.
While American companies like FedEx said they had also been hit, experts said
that computer users in the United States had so far been less affected than others because a British cybersecurity researcher inadvertently stopped the ransomware from spreading.
The attack spread like wildfire in Europe, including to companies like Deutsche Bahn, the German transport giant,
and Telefónica, a Spanish telecommunications firm, though no major service problems had been reported across the region’s transportation or telecommunications networks.
The global efforts came less than a day after malicious software, transmitted via email
and stolen from the National Security Agency, targeted vulnerabilities in computer systems in almost 100 countries in one of the largest “ransomware” attacks on record.
Some of the world’s largest institutions and government agencies were affected, including the
Russian Interior Ministry, FedEx in the United States and Britain’s National Health Service.
“That work is still ongoing.”
In Russia, Leonid Levin, the chairman of the parliamentary committee on information policy, said the attack showed the need for the country to add to legislation protecting “critical information infrastructure.”
That body of laws has drawn criticism in recent years from rights groups for blocking the free flow of information into and out of Russia.