Cybersecurity Stocks To Benefit As WaanaCry Hits Worldwide
Zacks Investment Research | May 14, 2017 10:44PM ET
A massive ransomware attack shocked the world last Friday which halted daily work at several companies, government offices and even hospitals across the globe. According to a report from cybersecurity firm, FireEye Inc. (NASDAQ:FEYE) , the attack which persisted throughout the whole weekend, infected over 200,000 computers in at least 150 countries across the Americas, Europe, Russia and Asia over the weekend.
Known as WannaCrypt or WannaCry, the malicious software reportedly seizes the control of computers and encrypted files with a password which only hackers have access to. After that, victims were asked to pay ransom in order to regain control of their systems. The hackers demanded ransom in bitcoin.
Citing a report of Avast Software BV, Bloomberg revealed that heavy concentration of infections has been seen in Russia and Ukraine. Apart from this, about 16 National Health Service (NHS) organizations in the UK, some of Renault (PA:RENA) factories and Nissan’s car plant in Sunderland were hit by this attack.
Operations of various other companies, like in the U.S. FedEx Corp. (NYSE:FDX) , in Germany Deutsche Bahn, China’s China National Petroleum Corp., in Japan Hitachi Ltd., and many others across the globe were adversely affected by this ransomware attack.
The most notable thing in this whole attack was that the hackers were able to infect only those computers which have older versions of Microsoft’s (NASDAQ:MSFT) operating systems (OS) – Windows XP, Windows 8 and Windows Server 2003. Notably, Microsoft stopped providing support to its older OS in the latter half of 2016, due to which these systems were not upgraded with Microsoft’s new security patches.
This made the older OS more vulnerable and hackers took the advantage of the same. However, Microsoft, taking a serious action on this issue, stated it will be releasing a security patch for its older OS.
According to Bloomberg, Aleks Gostev – chief cybersecurity expert for Kaspersky Labs – is suspecting some Russian language cybercriminals behind this attack. Notably, Russian hackers were in the limelight throughout last year, either for their supposed involvement in the Zacks Investment Research
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