In the age of digitisation and connectivity, a new form of extortion has arisen: ransomware
Over the past few months, organisations across the world have been targeted by a new form of cyberterrorism—ransomware. In a ransomware attack, the victim’s computer or network is locked and its data encrypted by hackers, who then demand money to release these back to their owners. While such assaults began as early as 2013, the last four months have seen repeated incidents all over the world.
In May, an attack using a new ransomware ‘cryptoworm’ called Wannacry brought many businesses in Europe to a standstill. This affected more than 230,000 computers in over 150 countries, badly hitting the Spanish telecom service provider Telefonica, the German state railways and the NHS, among others. Similarly. a new variant of the ransomware Petya, which caused a great deal of distress in Europe last year, surfaced in June. This time, the impact was closer to home as some systems in India were hit by the attack; this included the Jawaharlal Nehru Port Trust, whose terminals came to a halt. Later, in September, systems across the globe were assaulted by Locky. This was similar to WannaCry and posed such a serious threat to Indian systems that the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) issued a warning against it.
This story is from the November 20, 2017 edition of Outlook.
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This story is from the November 20, 2017 edition of Outlook.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
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