Remember the Wannacry virus last month? You should because it almost crippled Great Britain’s medical industry. It got IT services, too. ?But yesterday, something worse hit Europe. Worse than Wannacry: Super cyber attack hits globe.
Ukraine got the worst of it. The virus hit over countless computers. Banks failed. The ATM’s stopped working. Also, Ukraine government systems took a blow. So did Ukaraine’s major media stations, like ?Channel 24. In fact, cyber attackers broadcast messages like, “Nobody can recover your files without our decryption service”. Russian computers went down. For example, one Russian creditor can’t even process client operations. ? The hackers demand $300 in Bitcoin. That may not sound like much, but that’s over $770,000 in US dollars. And they want $770,000 per attack! So far, they only made 3.7 Bitcoin, or around $9,500. But the hackers just keep on hacking.
However, this attack is by no means limited to Russia and Ukraine. They hacked German businesses, like Deutsche Bank. Some of India’s ports couldn’t even function because of the cyber attack. In Australia, Quantas Airlines, their main airlines, their online booking system took a hit. ?In Tazmania, they had to shut a candy factory down. The US isn’t immune. In Pennsylvania, they had to cancel surgeries (sound familiar, England?). ?A US law firm also had to shut down. In fact, no continent went unscathed.
Some experts say this isn’t as bad as Wannacry, because this virus is more limited. I beg to differ. I think it’s worse than Wannacry. Here’s why. Some experts say the attackers didn’t really care if they got paid. That’s scary because they could have a far more sinister motive. And nobody in the world has any leads on who is behind this. For all we know, a rouge dictatorship (North Korea) or terrorist group (ISIS) could be doing this. I don’t know. So the fact nobody knows whose is doing this, and very few can seem to stop is is chilling. And look at the ramifications.All it took is a few hacks to stop governments, banks, hospitals, airlines, law firms. What if they get the power to stop whole world systems at once?