China issues a global warning on UIWIX ransomware!

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China has warned all nations across the globe against a ransomware named UIWIX which is spreading in a similar way like the “WannaCry” virus which infected more than 200,000 computers over 150 countries last week.

The National Computer Virus Emergency Response Center (CVERC) and software company AsiaInfo discovered this virus while probing into the Wanna cry whereabouts.

As per the reports released by Xinhua News Agency of China, the virus has the potential to exploit security holes left by Windows Operating systems like XP, 8 and 7.

Technically speaking, the virus creeps into the database, renames the files and encrypts them in such a way that the user cannot access data anymore.

The security researchers from AsiaInfo have discovered that the virus renames files with the extension “. UIWIX” and can prove more serious than wannacry.

Chinese newspaper Global Times said that UIWIX is a simple mutation of wanna cry and can be dubbed as a Wannacry 2.0 version. As wannacry is based on EternalBlue, an application developed by US National Security Agency to snoop on Windows operated systems on a worldwide note, UIWIX source code can also track to EternalBlue.

Xinhua news confirmed that over 30,000 companies were affected by the Wanna cry ransomware attack and one of the worst hit by the ransomware happens to be the state-controlled China National Petrol Corporation (CNPC).  After the said ransomware attack, CNPC chose to disconnect the servers to more than 20k service stations and decided to temporarily halt the acceptance of online payments.

In a separate news briefing to foreign media, China said that US NSA has to take the sole blame for the Wannacry ransomware attack and its effects on companies operating worldwide.

Does that mean NSA should pay for the losses for the companies affected by wannacry….?

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Naveen Goud is a writer at Cybersecurity Insiders covering topics such as Mergers & Acquisitions, Startups, Cyber Attacks, Cloud Security and Mobile Security

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