With the rising conflict amongst Ukraine and Russia that
prompted the killings of more than 10,000 Ukrainians and affected millions more
, the Russian hackers, in June 2017 came up with the most pulverizing cyber security breaches
to attack systems of the victims through an encrypted code that ranged from
media outlets to railway firms.
Andy
Greenberg, author of Sandworm and a
senior writer with the WIRED chronicled the birth of this biggest cyber attack
, in an excerpt from his book he says,
”For
the past four and a half years, Ukraine has been locked in a grinding,
undeclared war with Russia that has ultimately led to Ukraine becoming a
scorched-earth testing ground for the Russian cyber war tactics. In 2015 and
2016, while the Kremlin-linked hackers known as Fancy Bear were busy
breaking into the US Democratic National Committee’s servers, another group of
agents known as Sandworm was hacking into dozens of Ukrainian governmental
organisations and companies. They successfully managed to penetrate the
networks of victims ranging from media outlets to railway firms, detonating
logic bombs that destroyed terabytes of data.”
This
thought of obliteration brought forth NotPetya, a significantly greater danger
to the world than the scandalous Wannacry malware.
Petya
is amongst the family of those encrypting ransomware that was first discovered
in 2016. It goes for focusing only on Microsoft Windows-based frameworks,
infecting the master boot record in the process to execute a payload that
encodes a hard drive's file system table thus keeping Windows from booting. At
the same time consequently demanding from the user to make a payment in Bitcoin
with a specific end goal to recapture access to the system.
NotPetya
is simply one more form originating from Petya as both plan to encode the hard
drive of infected computers, there exists enough common features between the
two.
Now
in spite of the fact that NotPetya was focusing on war-ridden Ukraine, the
result was felt by the world. The malware could destruct computers, data and
wired machines over the world.
In
an excerpt from Sandworm published by WIRED, the writer describes how the
spread of the malware influenced not simply its expected casualty, i.e.
Ukraine, but also machineries all around the world.
The
after-effect of this attack was more than $10 billion in aggregation says the
Former Homeland Security advisor Tom Bossert, who amid the investigation and
analysis of the malware was US President Donald Trump's most senior cyber
security-¬focused official. Indeed, even the scandalous WannaCry, that spread a
month before NotPetya in May 2017, is assessed to have taken a toll between $4
billion and $8 billion.
Inevitably
the attack, which had begun as an impetus to win the war against Ukraine,
unequivocally focusing on a few hardware and computers in lodgings, hospitals,
government workplaces and many places of importance in the nation, spread like
wildfire, wreaking havoc and causing
tremendous destruction across the world.
In
any case, even after over a year, the uncouth demonstrations of the NotPetya
malware has not been wiped out totally as a few experts assert that the malware
still has the potential to emerge as sessions in various parts of the world or
even reoccur taking a much bigger frame.
Since
the ransomware is digging in for the long haul the admonition pretty much
continues as before for the users i.e. not to click on some obscure connections,
use of solid and one of a kind passwords, at the same time staying up with the
latest reinforcement which requires keeping an up-to-date backup.