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A message demanding money is seen on a terminal monitor at a branch of Ukraine's state-owned Oschadbank after Ukrainian institutions were hit by a wave of cyberattacks earlier Tuesday in Kiev, Ukraine. Valentyn Ogirenko/Reuters hide caption
A message demanding money is seen on a terminal monitor at a branch of Ukraine's state-owned Oschadbank after Ukrainian institutions were hit by a wave of cyberattacks earlier Tuesday in Kiev, Ukraine.
Updated at 5:57 p.m. ET
Ransomware hit at least six countries Tuesday, including Ukraine, where it was blamed for a large and coordinated attack on key parts of the nation's infrastructure, from government agencies and electric grids to stores and banks.
The malware has been called "Petya" but there is debate in the security community over whether the ransomware is new or a variant that has been enhanced to make it harder to stop.
In either case, it appears to be spreading globally, raising fears it might rival another widespread attack the WannaCry outbreak that struck in May.
The Maersk shipping company, based in Denmark, confirmed that its "IT systems are down across multiple sites and business units due to a cyber attack." And pharmaceutical giant Merck tweeted that its "computer network was compromised today as part of global hack."
In the U.S., Department of Homeland Security spokesman Scott McConnell says the agency is "monitoring reports of cyber attacks affecting multiple global entities and is coordinating with our international and domestic cyber partners."
Any requests for help from DHS are confidential, McConnell says.
Interpol says it is also "closely monitoring" the suspected attack.
Computers hit by the malware display a locked screen that demands a payment to retrieve files. The malware promises to provide a specialized key to users who pay a ransom of $300 in bitcoins the same ploy used by the WannaCry ransomware, which affected computers in more than 150 countries.
WannaCry was based on exploits stolen from the National Security Agency including a program called EternalBlue, which exploited a Microsoft vulnerability. Petya reportedly shares some of WannaCry's traits but while computers that had gotten a security patch were safe from WannaCry, Petya can also infect patched machines.
Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer at F-Secure, says Petya uses other exploits to spread in internal systems. "That's why patched systems can get hit."
Signs that this is a new strain led Kaspersky Lab malware analyst Vyacheslav Zakorzhevsky to say the outbreak comes from a "new ransomware we haven't seen before." For this reason, Kaspersky announced in a statement it would be coining a new name for the ransomware: "ExPetr."
"The company's telemetry data indicates around 2,000 attacked users so far," its statement continued, noting Ukraine and Russia appear to be the most affected. But "we have also registered hits in Poland, Italy, the UK, Germany, France, the US and several other countries."
Kaspersky is an NPR funder.
Raj Samani, head of strategic intelligence at McAfee, echoed these assessments.
"This outbreak does not appear to be as great as WannaCry," Samani said in a statement, "but the number of impacted organizations is significant."
Ukraine's security experts are working to fix the problem, according to the government portal. Until the issue is resolved, the government said, Ukrainians should simply turn off their computers.
While the malware's most concentrated effects were reported in Ukraine, several companies and at least one utility in Russia were also reportedly affected.
From Moscow, NPR's Lucian Kim reports, "Ukraine has blamed Russia for cyberattacks in the past, a charge Moscow denies. A number of Russian companies, including the state oil giant Rosneft, have also reported suffering cyberattacks today."
The attack struck at 2 p.m. local time, Ukraine's government says. The country's National Bank was among the first to report a problem. In Russia, the malware hit companies such as Mars, Nivea and Mondelez International, according to the Tass news agency.
Anton Gerashchenko, a lawmaker and adviser to Ukraine's interior minister, says he believes that despite its appearance as a ransomware hack, the attack is actually the work of Russian agents waging a type of hybrid warfare to try to destabilize Ukraine.
The malware was delivered in emails that had been created to resemble business correspondence, Gerashchenko said on his Facebook page. He added that the attack took days and likely weeks to stage before being activated.
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Massive Ransomware Attack Hits Ukraine; Experts Say It's Spreading Globally - NPR
By Molly McKew By Molly McKew June 27 at 1:53 PM
Molly K. McKew consults for governments and political parties on foreign policy and strategic communications. She advised former Georgian president Mikhail Saakashvilis government from 2009-2013 and former Moldovan prime minister Vlad Filat in 2014-2015.
Tuesdaymorning, Col. Maksym Shapoval, a top Ukrainian military intelligence officer who spent much of the past three years leading special operations close to the front in Ukraines eastern war, was killedby a car bomb in Kiev. This is part of a series of attacks, widely assumed by experts to be directed by Russian intelligence, against Ukrainian military, security and intelligence officials. The campaign appears to be aimed at weakening the countrys counterintelligence capabilities as well as intimidating soldiers and volunteers.
Ukraine has been fighting a war to defend the borders of Europe. It has fueled this effort largely with patriotism and little else, relying heavily on volunteers and crowdsourced resources, and often struggling against unstable political leadership in the capital.
Before he fled Kiev after the Euromaidan uprising in 2014, President Viktor Yanukovych spent years gutting Ukraines defense and security capacity. The vacuum that was left following the revolution was filled by Ukrainians such asShapoval, who understood what Moscow would do, as well as the devastating but essential lesson of fighting Russian aggression in the post-Soviet space: Nobodys coming, so theres only us.
Shapoval, who was in charge of Ukrainian special forces (his position is roughly equivalent to the top U.S. commander of Special Operations forces), made an outsized contribution to his countrys security capabilities. Like all special operators, Shapoval filled the space that needed to be filled, developing capacity that was needed human intelligence, defense of the occupied territories, planning to prevent attempted coups to defend Ukraine from the many threats it faced from its hostile neighbor. Shapoval focused as well on the challenges posed by Russias new approach to hybrid warfare including elements of informational, economic, political and cultural power projection and how to protect Ukrainian society and democracy from such attacks. This required nimble, rapid, creative thinking, and the ability to build and lead force capacity. The results have repeatedly shown that Ukraine is at the cutting edge of rethinking the response to modern irregular warfare.
Shapoval did what needed to be done. Much of it is still too secret to be shared. But his loss will be profoundly felt by a team already carrying a heavy load. Their work may be under-resourced, but it should not to be underestimated. For more than three years, Ukraine has fought a war against Russian forces and hasnt lost.
Ukrainian is the only modern army to have fought a land war against the revamped Russian military. Even as Moscow has used Eastern Ukraine as a laboratory to test new tools for electronic and special warfare, so too has Ukraine risen to the challenge to learn from these attacks and come up with scrappy ways to disrupt them. Special operators from the West have been in Ukraine as observers and advisers, trying to learn from the experience of their Ukrainian colleagues. Yes, they are there as much to learn as anything else.
Russia has succeeded in making the debate almost entirely about the useless, unobserved Minsk accords and about the maintenance (or not) of sanctions. None of this has anything to do with defending Ukraine, nor with penalizing Russia for its escalating aggression against Ukraine (and other countries).
Meanwhile, there has been relatively little discussion about bolstering Ukraines defensive, offensive and intelligence capabilities. Why is it that the United States is willing to support police reform but not counterintelligence, at a moment when increasingly bold Russian intelligence operations inside Ukraine are significantly disrupting the internal-security environment? The Ukrainian system is new, and highly dependent on individuals. The Russians understand exactly how demoralizing it is to slaughter them in the streets of the capital.
Even as Shapoval was assassinated, Ukraine was again targeted by a sweeping cyberattack. These are becoming steadily more intrusive. Ukraine needs to develop capabilities to counter hybrid threats. It needs more effective anti-corruption efforts that can expose Russian financial influence and better cyberdefense capabilities to protect critical infrastructure. It needs revamped counterintelligence services free of Moscows interference and the ability not only to expose but also to counter Russian information warfare. And we should all be invested in this, because while Ukraine may be the testing ground, the target is all of us.
Shapovals death is a painful loss for Ukraine. The Ukrainian identity that has emerged from the fires of the Maidan and the trenches in the East will remember these men and women who stepped into the void and did what everyone had always told them would be impossible: to fight Russia, and maybe even win. To reinvigorate our own understanding of what is possible in the face of a broad and shadowy Russian threat, we would do well to stand beside them and help them develop the capabilities we all need to defend our people and societies from new kinds of warfare.
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A killing in Kiev shows how the West continues to fail Ukraine - Washington Post
OLYMPIA FIELDS, Ill. (AP) Phil Mickelson isn't sure what's next for Jim "Bones" Mackay. He is sure there are going to be plenty of options for his longtime caddie.
Mickelson and Mackay announced last week they had decided to split up after 25 years and more than 600 tournaments around the world, ending one of golf's most successful relationships.
Mickelson's brother Tim is going to caddie for him for the rest of the year, and Lefty thinks there will be no shortage of potential suitors for Mackay.
"He's going to have some incredible opportunities," Mickelson said Monday in his first public comments since the split. "There's going to be a great player a lot of great players, but one great player's going to be lucky enough to have him and he's going to bring a lot to his game and they're going to be a great team. And then it gives me an opportunity to spend time with my brother for the rest of this year, which I'm looking forward to."
Tim Mickelson was the golf coach at Arizona State before he left the position to become Jon Rahm's agent, and Phil Mickelson thanked Rahm for approving his brother's new schedule. Tim Mickelson also carried his big brother's bag during the Mexico Championship when Mackay went down with a stomach virus.
Asked if Mackay will start working for Rahm, Phil Mickelson said he had no idea and didn't want to speculate on Mackay's next job.
"He's not told me anything and I think that he's going to have a lot of players call him and inquire about his services," Mickelson said. "That would be what I would anticipate. But I don't know."
Mickelson, who celebrated his 47th birthday on June 16, and Mackay started working together at a U.S. Open qualifier in Memphis, Tennessee in 1992. Mickelson was hoping to have their final round together at this year's U.S. Open, but he skipped the tournament to attend his oldest daughter's high school graduation in California.
Mackay went to Erin Hills in Wisconsin to scout the course in case a weather delay would have allowed Mickelson to make his tee time, but it didn't work out. Instead, their last round was in the St. Jude Classic in Memphis.
"We knew that final round in Memphis that that was our last round together or most likely," Mickelson said. "We were holding out hope that it wasn't, that we had one more week, and it was an emotional day. But we both know it's time."
Mickelson joined LPGA stars Brooke Henderson, Lydia Ko and Stacy Lewis for a skills challenge at Olympia Fields on Monday ahead of this weekend's KPMG Women's PGA Championship. Mickelson and KPMG also announced a donation by the Phil and Amy Mickelson Foundation to the company's future leaders program, which awards college scholarships to young women and brings them to Stanford University for a leadership development retreat.
Mickelson signed autographs for about a half-hour after winning the skills competition, which included a couple different chipping contests and a knockout game involving images of each player behind plates of glass.
"I was nervous because I know how good they are," he said, "and it was fun because it gave me an opportunity to be around some of the best players in the world, best athletes in the world."
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Mickelson thinks Mackay will caddie again soon - Waterloo Cedar Falls Courier
"The reason that President Obama did NOTHING about Russia after being notified by the CIA of meddling is that he expected Clinton would win ... and did not want to 'rock the boat.' He didn't 'choke,' he colluded or obstructed, and it did the Dems and Crooked Hillary no good," Trump wrote.
"The real story is that President Obama did NOTHING after being informed in August about Russian meddling. With 4 months looking at Russia ... under a magnifying glass, they have zero 'tapes' of T people colluding. There is no collusion & no obstruction. I should be given apology!" he wrote on Twitter.
It was unclear who Trump was demanding an apology from or who he was accusing Obama of colluding with.
White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer said on Monday that the Obama administration's actions on Russia raise questions about the former president's motivations.
"They have been very clear, they've been playing this card about blaming Trump and Russia," Spicer said during an off-camera briefing at the White House. "And yet at the same time, they were the ones who, according to this report, knew about it and didn't take any action."
"So the question is, if they didn't take any action, does that make them complicit? I think there are a lot of questions that need to get answered about who knew what and when," Spicer said.
Trump has often expressed deep frustration over accusations that individuals in his orbit colluded with Russia during the election and assertions that he may have tried to personally influence the FBI's probe into the matter.
The Post said the Obama administration felt its hands were tied when Russian hacking first came to light because it did not want to be accused of interfering in an already turbulent campaign. At the time, Trump was claiming publicly that the election was rigged against him.
In a tweet Saturday, Trump wrote: "Since the Obama Administration was told way before the 2016 Election that the Russians were meddling, why no action? Focus on them, not T!"
Trump also criticized Obama in an interview that was broadcast on "Fox and Friends" on Sunday.
"It's an amazing thing. To me -- in other words, the question is, if he had the information, why didn't he do something about it?" Trump said, apparently seizing on a quote in the Post report that indicated that many Obama administration officials now believe that their own response to Russian hacking was insufficient.
"I feel like we sort of choked," one former senior Obama aide told the Post, referring to the administration's decision to impose sanctions and insert cyberweapons inside Russia's critical infrastructure that could be activated at a future point rather than launch more extreme retaliatory measures.
Trump's criticism of Obama comes as questions remain about whether the White House intends to take any muscular action to punish the Kremlin or to shore up US electoral defenses.
But now Trump seems to be finally acknowledging that Russia did play a role in the election.
Last week, White House spokesman Sean Spicer told reporters that he had not had a chance to sit down with the President to ask him whether he agreed with his intelligence agencies that Russia did actually interfere in the election. Pushed on Friday, Spicer said that Trump stood by a comment in January this year when he said: "I think it was Russia." Spicer also said Trump was concerned about election interference by "any actor."
A former Obama White House official called the Trump administration's attacks "a transparent effort to distract from the terrible impact of their ACA repeal bill."
"This situation was taken extremely seriously," the official added, defending Obama's decision to raise the issue directly with President Putin, direct a comprehensive intelligence review, shut down two Russian compounds, sanction nine Russian entities and individuals, and eject 35 Russian diplomats from the country.
CNN's Stephen Collinson and Kevin Liptak contributed to this report.
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