Wanna Cry ransomware cyber attack: 104 countries hit, India among worst affected, US NSA attracts criticism

The crippling Wanna Cry ransomware attack, which used an exploit first developed by the US NSA, appeared to be slowing on Saturday. Edward Snowden was among those who criticised the NSA, saying the US spy agency has been building dangerous attack tools.

The Wanna Cry ransomware attack – one of the largest ever cyber attacks – appeared to be slowing around 24 hours after it wrecked havoc and shut down tens of thousands of computer systems across 104 countries.

The slow down happened soon after ‘MalwareTech’, a Britain-based security researcher, accidentally discovered a ‘kill switch’ to halt the Wanna Cry attack. Experts, however, warned that enterprising hackers could circumvent MalwareTech’s fix.Â

Over 200,000 systems around the world were affected in the Wanna Cry attack, a tracker developed by a security researcher called ‘MalwareTech’ showed. Czech Republic-based anti-virus provider Avast, however, gave a more conservative estimate of around 126,000 systems being affected, news agency Reuters reported.

INDIA TARGETED

India was among the countries worst affected by the Wanna Cry attack, data shared by Kaspersky, a Russian anti-virus company, showed. According to initial calculations performed soon after the malware struck on Friday night, around five per cent of all computers affected in the attack were in India.

Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer at a Helsinki-based cyber security company called F-Secure, told news agency AFP that the it was the biggest ransomware outbreak in history and estimated that 130,000 systems in more than 100 countries had been affected.

Hypponen added that Russia and India were hit particularly hard, largely because Microsoft’s Windows XP – one of the operating systems most at risk – was still widely used in the countries.

News agency IANS reported that police computers across 18 units in Andhra Pradesh’s Chittoor, Krishna, Guntur, Visakhatpatnam and Srikakulam districts were affected. However, apart from that, there was no immediate information on the extent of the ransomware’s hold on Indian systems.