Researchers at Kaspersky Lab in Russia said Wednesday that a regional Ukrainian website had been hacked and used to distribute the ransomware, which attacked around 2,000 users, bringing computers to a halt across the globe.
The company said that its preliminary findings suggest the malware is a new kind of ransomware not seen before, not a variant of the Petya ransomware, as other cybersecurity researchers had suggested. It named the malware *ExPetr*, adding that while “it has several strings similar to Petya, it possesses entirely different functionality.”
Kaspersky estimated that there had been more than 2,000 attacks — 60 percent of them in Ukraine and 30 percent in Russia, including the country’s largest oil company.
But Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said “no serious problems” had occurred as a result of the cyberattacks. Speaking on a conference call Wednesday, Peskov also said he had no accurate information on the origin of the attacks.
MOSCOW — Companies worldwide struggled to recover Wednesday after a wave of powerful cyberattacks crippled computer systems in Europe, Asia and the United States with a virus similar to the global ransomware assault in May that infected computers.
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