WORLD CYBERWATCH

«WITHOUT PREVIOUS» according to EUROPOL

"The recent attack is unprecedented and will require a complex international investigation to identify the perpetrators," said the European Police Office Europol "whose European Cybercrime Center (EC3)" is working with cybercrime units Of affected countries.

During the night, the list of victims of the global cyber attack detected Friday by the American and British authorities has massively extended:

About 100 countries have been hit by a global cyber attack.

On Saturday morning, there were about a hundred countries targeted by hackers and many companies or public services acknowledged being hit or attacked. In the UK, about forty hospitals saw a demand for ransom appear on their screens.

Prime Minister Theresa May said in the early evening on SkyNews that

"This is not the NHS, it is an international attack and several countries and organizations have been affected."

In France Renault had to stop the production of certain sites. The Sunderland plant in the Japanese manufacturer Nissan, a Renault partner, was also hit, a Nissan spokesman confirmed.

Public organizations and companies have been affected in the United States. The FedEx package giant has admitted to being infected. And in the United Kingdom, but also in Spain, Australia, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Mexico, China, Ukraine and Taiwan. Telefonica in Spain but also the German railways, the Deutsche Bahn, said they were the target of its attacks.

"About 1,000 computers from the Russian Interior Ministry have been affected by a massive cyb er attack," a spokesman for the ministry told Interfax on the evening of 12 May. The Russian banking system has been affected.

A spokeswoman for the ministry, Irina Volk, told agencies that the virus was attacking Windows-based PCs.

"The virus has been located and the technical operations are underway to destroy it and to revive anti-virus programs," she said.

The list of affected countries is particularly long and there is little doubt among experts:

For them all incidents are linked.

And this is all the more so because in many cases, the same messages, containing a ransom demand of 300 dollars payable in bitcoins appeared on the screens of the victims.

"We have seen more than 75,000 attacks in 99 countries,

"Said Jakub Kroustek of Avast IT security company on his blog. Another computer security company mentioned "a major campaign to spread infected emails", with some 5 million emails sent every hour spreading the malware called WCry

, WannaCry, WanaCrypt0r, WannaCrypt or Wana Decrypt0r.

How did the hackers proceed?

A ransom software exploited a flaw in Windows systems, leaked into pirated documents from the US security agency NSA.

This flaw in Windows had been discovered by the American intelligence services (NSA).

The pirates apparently exploited it.

Edward Snowden took the opportunity to give a new lesson to his former employer.

"If the NSA had privately discussed this flaw used to attack hospitals when they" discovered "it, rather than when it was stolen from them, it could have been avoided," says Edward on Twitter Snowden, the former cons

ultant to the US security agency who had unveiled the extent of surveillance of the NSA in 2013.

The virus, which exploits a flaw in the Windows operating system, encrypts the data and demands a ransom against the decoding key. The software used by hackers locks users' files and forces them to pay a sum of money in form Bitcoins to recover its use.

A practice, called "ransomwares" becoming more and more common.

"This ransom software can spread without anyone opening an email or clicking on a link. Unlike normal viruses, this virus spreads directly from computer to computer on local servers, rather than by email, "said Lance Cottrell, scientific director of the US technology group Ntrepid.

The social networks shared images with NHS computer screens requesting the payment of 300 dollars in bitcoins with the mention:

Oops, your files were encrypted."

The payment must occur within three days, or the price double, and if the money is not paid within seven days the pirated files will be erased, the message clarifies.

"Individuals and organizations are encouraged not to pay the ransom as this does not guarantee that access to the data will be restored," the US Department of Homeland Security said in a statement.

Soon after this flaw was made public, Microsoft released a fix to prevent attacks, but a plethora of systems were obviously not updated by their users. The pirates took advantage of this by writing their ransom request - which appears on the victims' screen and blocks it - in 17 languages.

Few users have used the patch released in the spring by Microsoft.

And to the US computer giant to publish Friday a long note to explain how to protect more specifically attacks related to WannaCrypt. He highlighted in particular the provision of an update of Windows Defender, the home system against malware..