Reuters | Breaking Views | By: Richard Beales | Wed Jun 28, 2017 | 4:47pm EDT
Who’d be in charge of a corporate IT network with hacks, phishing and now a double dose of so-called ransomware to contend with? This week’s cyber attack hit targets from Ukraine to the United States and more than 60 other countries. Human error enables hacking of today’s network setups. A shift to the cloud reduces that danger, but brings others.
The latest rogue software, a variant of something called Petya, locks computers and posts a message demanding $300 in bitcoins to recover the data. Like the WannaCry virus last month that hit National Health Service computers in the UK, among others, it gets into PCs using code known as Eternal Blue, which security experts believe was developed by the U.S. National Security Agency.
Monday’s attack hit Ukraine’s international airport, Russian oil group Rosneft, advertising giant WPP and FedEx’s TNT Express unit, among others. Its spread may have been limited, though, because after WannaCry many firms patched software including older Microsoft operating systems.
Yet there are new concerns, too. With today’s hybrid system, cloud-based software can propagate Petya or other malicious agents rapidly. A cloud outage can affect far more users than a cyber attack, as customers of Amazon found out in March when part of the company’s cloud went dark. Companies may need to hire multiple cloud-services providers to minimize this risk.
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