Welcome to DU! The truly grassroots left-of-center political community where regular people, not algorithms, drive the discussions and set the standards. Join the community: Create a free account Support DU (and get rid of ads!): Become a Star Member All Forums Issue Forums Culture Forums Alliance Forums Region Forums Support Forums Help & Search

C Moon

(12,180 posts)
Wed Aug 22, 2018, 02:16 PM Aug 2018

Scary stuff: The Untold Story of NotPetya, the Most Devastating Cyberattack in History

https://www.wired.com/story/notpetya-cyberattack-ukraine-russia-code-crashed-the-world

Crippled ports. Paralyzed corporations. Frozen government agencies. How a single piece of code crashed the world.

It was a perfect sunny summer afternoon in Copenhagen when the world’s largest shipping conglomerate began to lose its mind.

The headquarters of A.P. Møller-Maersk sits beside the breezy, cobblestoned esplanade of Copenhagen’s harbor. A ship’s mast carrying the Danish flag is planted by the building’s northeastern corner, and six stories of blue-tinted windows look out over the water, facing a dock where the Danish royal family parks its yacht. In the building’s basement, employees can browse a corporate gift shop, stocked with Maersk-branded bags and ties, and even a rare Lego model of the company’s gargantuan Triple-E container ship, a vessel roughly as large as the Empire State Building laid on its side, capable of carrying another Empire State Building–sized load of cargo stacked on top of it.

That gift shop also houses a technology help center, a single desk manned by IT troubleshooters next to the shop’s cashier. And on the afternoon of June 27, 2017, confused Maersk staffers began to gather at that help desk in twos and threes, almost all of them carrying laptops. On the machines’ screens were messages in red and black lettering. Some read “repairing file system on C:” with a stark warning not to turn off the computer. Others, more surreally, read “oops, your important files are encrypted” and demanded a payment of $300 worth of bitcoin to decrypt them.
...
3 replies = new reply since forum marked as read
Highlight: NoneDon't highlight anything 5 newestHighlight 5 most recent replies
Scary stuff: The Untold Story of NotPetya, the Most Devastating Cyberattack in History (Original Post) C Moon Aug 2018 OP
Scary indeed and another example of Putin's well honed cyber warfare. Excerpt: Fred Sanders Aug 2018 #1
This is one of the most absorbing stories I have read of late. dixiegrrrrl Sep 2018 #2
Ha!! Just as I thought...Windows!! dixiegrrrrl Sep 2018 #3

Fred Sanders

(23,946 posts)
1. Scary indeed and another example of Putin's well honed cyber warfare. Excerpt:
Wed Aug 22, 2018, 02:34 PM
Aug 2018

"For the past four and a half years, Ukraine has been locked in a grinding, undeclared war with Russia that has killed more than 10,000 Ukrainians and displaced millions more. The conflict has also seen Ukraine become a scorched-earth testing ground for Russian cyberwar tactics. In 2015 and 2016, while the Kremlin-linked hackers known as Fancy Bear were busy breaking into the US Democratic National Committee’s servers, another group of agents known as Sandworm was hacking into dozens of Ukrainian governmental organizations and companies. They penetrated the networks of victims ranging from media outlets to railway firms, detonating logic bombs that destroyed terabytes of data. The attacks followed a sadistic seasonal cadence. In the winters of both years, the saboteurs capped off their destructive sprees by causing widespread power outages—the first confirmed blackouts induced by hackers."

dixiegrrrrl

(60,010 posts)
2. This is one of the most absorbing stories I have read of late.
Sat Sep 8, 2018, 05:43 PM
Sep 2018

Can't wait for the book to come out.

thank you for posting this!

dixiegrrrrl

(60,010 posts)
3. Ha!! Just as I thought...Windows!!
Sat Sep 8, 2018, 06:03 PM
Sep 2018

Not only Windows, but...

.some of the corporation’s servers were, up until the attack, still running Windows 2000—an operating system so old Microsoft no longer supported it.


Not sure their fix is any better...
Multifactor authentication has been rolled out across the company, along with a long-delayed upgrade to Windows 10.
Latest Discussions»General Discussion»Scary stuff: The Untold S...