NotPetya: How a Russian malware created the world's worst cyberattack ever

Imagine you wake up one day for work and realise that the IT hub in the office is acting fishy. All your colleagues, donning sharp suits, carrying compact laptops and tablets in one hand, a flask of coffee on the other, head to their desks for the day's operations to begin, only to find out that their files, both official and personal, are being "encrypted". A daunting idea, isn't it? And what if these files in your C drive are mysteriously being repaired or, maybe in a more surreal way, you are being ordered to pay a sum of $300 worth of bitcoin to decrypt the files -- all this is not just a wicked idea, but this is what happened at the time when the most devastating cyberattack took place in today's history.

Andy Greenberg, a senior writer with WIRED and author of his forthcoming Doubleday publication, Sandworm, chronicled the birth of the biggest cyberattack, that began, at least, as an assault on one nation by another. In an excerpt from his book, Greenberg says,"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.