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Among those affected in the US were hospitals, the pharmaceutical company Merck, Nabisco and Oreo. A major Los Angeles port was forced to stop operations yesterday because of the attack and was still closed as of this morning. FedEx also experienced disruptions in its TNT Express delivery service. A US nuclear power plant was the victim of a cyberattack as well, but it's not as of yet clear whether it was connected to the others.

The virus being spread is thought to be a version of the "Petya" ransomware and like the WannaCry virus that wreaked international havoc in May, it appears to take advantage of a Microsoft Windows flaw uncovered by the NSA and published online by hackers. This virus, however, seems to only be able to spread between directly connected networks, which is believed to be the reason the attack seemed to slow throughout the day Tuesday.

It's still unclear as of now who is behind the attack.

More here:
US hit by cyberattack that targeted Ukraine and Russia - Engadget - Engadget

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

BERLIN German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel said on Monday that both Ukraine and Russian-backed separatists were violating a ceasefire agreement in eastern Ukraine and it would likely be difficult to resolve the crisis in the short term.

"It's very difficult to find a way out after so many years," Gabriel told an event hosted by the European Council on Foreign Relations. "Of course we are trying, but it does not look like we will have a (short-term resolution) of the difficulties in the region."

Gabriel said he backed continued efforts by the so-called "Normandy format" group - involving Germany, France, Ukraine and Russia - to resolve the crisis, but observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) were not optimistic, given the situation in the region.

"I have no good messages on this issue," he said.

(Reporting by Andrea Shalal; Editing by Joseph Nasr)

WASHINGTON U.S. President Donald Trump urged Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to do more to relax Indian trade barriers on Monday during talks in which both leaders took great pains to stress the importance of a strong U.S.-Indian relationship.

BEIJING Nobel Peace Prize-winning activist Liu Xiaobo's liver cancer is beyond treatment by surgery, chemotherapy and radiotherapy, Liu's wife said in a video, as worries deepen among supporters over his treatment by the Chinese authorities.

Originally posted here:
Germany sees 'very difficult' situation in eastern Ukraine | Reuters - Reuters

The minister, speaking after talks between Ukraine's President Petro Poroshenko and his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron, said the EU needed more assurances from Moscow.

"What is now on the table is not enough to engage in any meaningful conversation with Russia," he said, adding that Macron and Poroshenko had touched on the issue of the pipeline project, in which French utility Engie is a partner.

Ukraine, a major transit route for Russian gas to Europe, is embroiled in a conflict with Russia in its eastern region. Western nations have imposed sanctions on Moscow over the crisis.

"We need clear guarantees that any kind of development would not hamper Ukraine from the point of energy security and from the point of gas supplies. This is a fundamental point," the Ukrainian minister said.

"How can you trust Russia in setting up a unique source of gas supply?" Klimkin said.

Thirteen EU nations voiced support on Monday for a proposal to empower the EU executive to negotiate with Russia over objections to the pipeline, despite Germany's opposition. A vote on the issue will take place in the autumn.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said last week she saw no role for the European Commission and said it risked delaying construction of the pipeline to supply gas from Russia's Baltic coast to Germany by 2019.

"We made the point that the project has no economic viability," the Ukrainian minister said. "Maybe some companies will benefit for the time being but in the long run it will lead to nowhere."

(Editing by Edmund Blair)

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EU Must Get More Russian Guarantees Over Gas Pipeline Plan-Ukraine - New York Times