Russia along with Ukraine, Germany, Turkey and some other European nations have been hit by a new wave of Cyber Attack yesterday. Two Russian Cyber Security firms Kaspersky Labs and Group IB have discovered that the attack was carried out with the use of BadRabbit Cryptographic malware which demands 0.05 BTC for decryption.
As per the details available to Cybersecurity Insiders so far, BadRabbit seems to be a dubbed version of NotPetya ransomware variant which has disrupted computer networks working across Russia, Ukraine, Bulgaria, and Germany causing loss of billions of dollars.
Those amongst the badly affected organizations happen to be Russia’s Interfax news agency, Kiev’s metro system, and Ukraine’s Odessa Airport.
Robert Lipovsky, a researcher at cyber firm ESET said the attacks were launched with critical infrastructure such as transport operators as prime targets.
Remember, this is a third major ransomware attack this year. First was in the form of WannaCry which disrupted more than 280,000 computers across the globe. The second was NotPetya which disrupted computer networks in Europe and the third titled as ‘BadRabbit’ halted the computer networks across Russia and some parts of Europe.
Note 1- Ransomware is a computer virus which has the ability to halt computer operations at an organization by encrypting the database until a ransom is paid.
Note 2- There is no guarantee that the mischief creators or the ransomware developers/hackers will return the decryption key after realizing the ransom.
Note 3- The only way to help your company come out of a ransomware attack is to use a business continuity plan until the infected systems are restored or replaced by new hardware and software.
Note 4- Nations like UK, USA; Canada blamed Russia for launching cyber attacks on their critical infrastructure.
But now the situations have turned otherwise and wonder who will take the blame!
