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. 

The world once laughed at North Korean cyberpower

When North Korean hackers tried to steal $1 billion from the New York Federal Reserve last year, only a spelling error stopped them. They were digitally looting an account of the Bangladesh Central Bank, when bankers grew suspicious about a withdrawal request that had misspelled “foundation” as “fandation.”

Even so, Kim Jong-un’s minions still got away with $81 million in that heist.

Then only sheer luck enabled a 22-year-old British hacker to defuse the biggest North Korean cyberattack to date, a ransomware attack last May that failed to generate much cash but brought down hundreds of thousands of computers across dozens of countries — and briefly crippled Britain’s National Health Service.

Their track record is mixed, but North Korea’s army of more than 6,000 hackers is undeniably persistent, and undeniably improving, according to American and British security officials who have traced these attacks and others back to the North.

Amid all the attention on Pyongyang’s progress in developing a nuclear weapon capable of striking the continental United States, the North Koreans have also quietly developed a cyberprogram that is stealing hundreds of millions of dollars and proving capable of unleashing global havoc.
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