Infographic: How Ransomware Attacks Spread Around the World

As the latest wave of ransomware attacks known as Petya unfolds, we take a look at where it’s happening and what it actually means

We all know that cyber crime and so-called Ransomware (where hackers basically hold your data hostage until you pay them to release it back to you) is bad news, but what is it and how does this latest wave differ from what we’ve seen before?

Chris Morales, head of security analytics at Vectra Networks, says there are clear parallels with previous attacks, and points to the fact that organisations need to be much more on top of their game where it comes to reinforcing up their cyber security provisions and patching up vulnerabilities that leave them open to such attacks.

“Petya is a wormlike spreading is similar to WannaCry and Conficker and causes detections for reconnaissance and lateral movements in our AI software. We expected WannaCry to cause organisations to patch their Windows systems that have the SMB vulnerability so I am dumbfounded that this is even working. This is a prime example of needing to patch vulnerabilities when discovered. It’s affected computers in the exact same way that WannaCry did and this attack tells us who the true laggards are when it comes to patching systems.”