Hacking Attack Has Security Experts Scrambling to Contain Fallout -<br />By MARK SCOTT and NICK WINGFIELDMAY 13, 2017<br />Governments, companies and security experts from China to Britain raced on Saturday to contain the fallout from an audacious global cyberattack amid fears<br />that if they did not succeed, companies would lose their data unless they met ransom demands.<br />While American companies like FedEx said they had also been hit, experts said<br />that computer users in the United States had so far been less affected than others because a British cybersecurity researcher inadvertently stopped the ransomware from spreading.<br />The attack spread like wildfire in Europe, including to companies like Deutsche Bahn, the German transport giant,<br />and Telefónica, a Spanish telecommunications firm, though no major service problems had been reported across the region’s transportation or telecommunications networks.<br />The global efforts came less than a day after malicious software, transmitted via email<br />and stolen from the National Security Agency, targeted vulnerabilities in computer systems in almost 100 countries in one of the largest “ransomware” attacks on record.<br />Some of the world’s largest institutions and government agencies were affected, including the<br />Russian Interior Ministry, FedEx in the United States and Britain’s National Health Service.<br />“That work is still ongoing.”<br />In Russia, Leonid Levin, the chairman of the parliamentary committee on information policy, said the attack showed the need for the country to add to legislation protecting “critical information infrastructure.”<br />That body of laws has drawn criticism in recent years from rights groups for blocking the free flow of information into and out of Russia.
