Image: Maersk
This is a rivieting story by Wired on the NotPetya virus and how it wiped out the computer networks of companies worldwide in 2017 including Maersk. A fifth of the world's shipping capacity was shutdown for over 10 days. Shipping ports around the world had to revert to manual paper systems while Maersk IT workers flew in a sole unaffected DNS controller backup from a server in Ghana that happened to be knocked offline by a powercut before the infection. The attack is thought to have originated in Russia, aimed at crippling infrastructure in the Ukraine. A large bank in the Ukraine was taken down in 45 seconds by the malware which wipes the MBR of each PC after gaining admin credentials on the network. An update server of a popular accounting software package supplier was found to be the ground zero distribution point used to send NotPetya across the Ukraine and beyond. The moral of the story, segregate your networks and backups.
